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By: Keith Campbell

South African expertise has played a major role in the development of Swedish avia-tion group Saab’s ground-breaking Civil Aircraft Missile Protection System (Camps). The development of the system involved Saab, in Sweden, Saab Avitronics, in South Africa, and specialist UK company Chemring Countermeasures.

The flight testing of the completed prototype system was made possible by South Africa’s Naturelink Avia-tion, which provided an Embraer EMB-120 Bras?lia 30-seat twin- turboprop airliner to act as a trials aircraft, as well as a Beech King Air six-seat twin turboprop to act as ‘chase-plane’ during the test programme. The flight test programme was carried out from the South African Air Force’s Air Force Base Overberg, near Bredasdorp, in the Western Cape – the home of the Flight Test and Development Centre.

“This is totally a company initia- tive at the moment, but we see the market developing,” explains Saab senior marketing and sales executive G?ran Karlstr?m. “The initial market will most probably be for special missions and VIP aircraft, not airliners on scheduled services.” Special missions, in civil aviation, include flights in support of international agencies (such as the UN system), aid relief missions, nongovernmental organisations, and multinational corporations, into and out of
conflict areas.

Soberingly, over the past ten years there have been 35 attempts to shoot down civilian aircraft. “We’re not really aiming for the airline market at the moment,” he says.

Naturelink operates aircraft on charters in such conflict areas in Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere. “Naturelink is very interested in the system – it was installed on its aircraft using its own funds,” he highlights. “We’re also getting a lot of interest from governments.”

Camps is designed to protect civil aircraft from man-portable air defence systems (manpads – shoulder-fired infrared [IR] homing surface-to-air missiles) and comprises an already in-service and proven missile approach warning system (MAWS), four sensors, which detect the IR heat signature of the plume from the missile’s rocket motor, electromechanically activated decoy dispensers, and pyrophoric decoys which emit only in the IR range of the spectrum. A pyrophoric material is one which reacts with oxygen when it is exposed to air. “In this case, the pyrophoric material in the decoys heats up,” he says. Because they emit only in IR, the decoys are invisible to naked-eye observation from the ground. “The sensors are South African, the dispensers are Swedish, and the decoys British – the programme manager is in Sweden but it truly is an integrated effort,” affirms Karlstrom.

The system can be configured to act automatically or manually, but the former is better as the flight time of a manpads missile – usually launched at a range of about 3 km – is measured in a few seconds, giving very little time indeed for manual reaction. It is designed to deal with first- and second-generation manpads, which are the types in the hands of irregular groups and non-State actors.

Self-protection systems have been in service with military aircraft for years, indeed, decades, and have a long record of success; however, adapting such systems to civil aircraft is far from easy. Camps is designed for civil requirements and is going to acquire civil certification to fly without restrictions on civil aircraft. The military systems require trained and qualified ordnance personnel to load, arm, remove, and maintain them, as these systems use pyrotechnic decoys and explosive decoy ejection systems – and, by definition, civil aviation companies do not have and do not want to have specialist ordnance personnel on their payrolls. So Camps was speci-ally developed to avoid the need for ordnance experts.

As previously mentioned, the decoys are pyrophoric, not pyrotechnic, and, therefore, are not classified as munitions. The decoys are covered by protective packs which only rip open in high wind speeds (as created by an aircraft taking off or landing) – so if they are accidentally ejected while the aircraft is on the ground, they will not pose a hazard. The packaged decoys are, in turn, loaded in the factory into hermetically sealed containers; only the ground crew handle these and never the decoys themselves. The decoys have a life of 12 months, and reloading and maintenance are done at the factory; only correctional, not preventive, maintenance is required and maintenance occurs at the normal aircraft maintenance intervals. Ejection of the decoys is by electromechanical means, which is safer and considerably reduces the stress on the airframe.

In operation, if a missile is fired against the aircraft, the MAWS warns the flight crew of the danger; the sensors detect the missile plume; the system calculates the optimum moment to eject the decoys to distract the missile; the decoys are ejected; the missile is confused, its lock on the aircraft is broken, and it misses its target; and the attack fails.