The U.S. government says that there are still thousands of shoulder-fired missiles on the black market, and as BAE Systems modifies one of its military countermeasures systems to protect commercial airlines, one of the first beneficiaries is turning out to be the military.

Adapting for civilian use a system that includes a common missile warning system and a turret to direct a laser beam into the sensor eye of an incoming heat-seeking missile poses a challenge. Paul R. Handwerker, vice president of business development for electronic warfare, says that military countermeasures systems have a mean time between failure (MTBF) in the hundreds of hours. The airlines, however, want those figures to be in thousands of hours, which is why BAE's Jeteye system started service on the first of three American Airlines 767s in revenue passenger service on July 11. The aim is to find out what the real world reliability will be.

Handwerker says that the company's goal is to get the Jeteye system for use on civil aircraft to 3,000 hours MTBF and the "stretch goal" is 10,000 hours. Any system on an airline that has less than 10,000 hours MTBF is usually considered a problem by airline executives.