Delta Air Pilots Startled By Warning From LaGuardia Tower To Be On The Lookout For Rocket Launchers While On Final Approach

The pilots of a Delta Air Lines flight from Detroit to LaGuardia on Tuesday evening were left startled and confused when the Air Traffic Control tower at LGA told them to be on the lookout for a ground-to-air rocket launcher.

“All right, Delta 2604, LaGuardia Tower, Wind 210 at 10, Runway 22 cleared to land,” the air traffic controller told the pilots of the Boeing 737 in what seemed like a completely routine communication from the LaGuardia tower.

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But without taking a breath, the controller then added: “MANPAD alert issued at LaGuardia Airport at 0027, use extreme caution.”

The pilots then read back the landing clearance, as is standard, but they clearly were confused by the second part of the controller’s message, asking the tower what a MANPAD is.

For those not in the know, a MANPAD is a ‘man-portable air defense system,’ more commonly referred to as a rocket launcher. MANPAD alerts are, without doubt, not only incredibly serious but also incredibly rare within the United States.

Military pilots might be accustomed to hearing a MANPAD alert while landing or taking off in active conflict zones, but an alert of this kind at a civilian airport in the Queens area of New York City is anything but usual day-to-day business.

The controller reads out the definition of MANPAD to the pilots of Delta flight 2604 and then adds: “Yeah, it’s, uh, basically a report of a rocket launcher.”

“There was a report by the Port Authority Police, and they said by Terminal C, but there have been conflicting reports, and nothing has been an issue as of yet.”

A little later, the controller then added: “Port Authority Police reported that it was a non-credible threat.”

So, what exactly happened here?

There’s been no news from the Port Authority Police, but there are likely two reasons for this alert:

• The first is that someone genuinely thought that they had seen a MANPAD being set up on the outskirts of the airport and reported this to the police.
• The second is that someone thought it would be funny to call in a hoax MANPAD alert, with the hope of its causing flight diversions and chaos at LaGuardia.

In any case, MANPADS are taken incredibly seriously at major international airports, even if they are nowhere near a conflict zone. Intelligence services have long feared that a terrorist group might try to obtain a MANPAD to take down a civilian aircraft in a country where such threats would seem, at first, ridiculous.

In 2022, FedEx Express sought permission from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to install a high-tech missile defense system on some of its aircraft.

The ‘novel’ defense system would use laser beams to detect and shoot down heat-seeking missiles and would be installed on some of FedEx’s Airbus A321 cargo planes. The FAA issued a notice of proposed special conditions before the system could be installed but, just two days later, the agency withdrew the notice.

Israeli flag carrier El Al is believed to be the only commercial airline to equip its aircraft with a missile defense system, although the system that El Al uses relies upon an older flare technology to throw the missiles off course.

The decision by El Al to fit missile defense systems to its aircraft came two years after a 2002 attack on a Boeing 757-300 and operated by fellow Israeli airline Arkia as it took off from Mombasa in Kenya.

Two MANPAD-fired missiles were shot at the aircraft as it climbed out of Mombasa, but they luckily missed, and all 261 passengers and 10 crew were unharmed.