Old 07-30-2014 | 10:28 AM
  #72  
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spaaks
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Originally Posted by gloopy
Well yeah, and they could get death star tractor beams too.

Attempting to equate crude RPG's that can barely hit something close range and stationary with advanced anti aircraft guided missile systems is quite a leap.

Of course that's a threat, but it has nothing to do with RPG's.
apparently somebody gets what I was talking about

The Airline Threat No One's Talking About - Bloomberg View

The missiles -- known as Manpads, for Man-Portable Air Defense Systems -- don't have the range of the weapon that shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine. But they've been variously described as a "game changer," "our worst nightmare" and "an unprecedented threat." They're cheap, portable and potentially devastating to low-flying planes. Since 1975, they've hit civilian aircraft 40 times by one estimate, killing about 800 people.

And they're everywhere. As many as 750,000 Manpads are stockpiled around the world. They've turned up among rebel groups from Ukraine to Somalia. A United Nations report found that missiles from a cache in Libya have been dispersed to Mali, Tunisia and other countries. As jihadists -- many of them European -- return home from the wars in Syria and Iraq, these weapons may spread further.
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