PARIS, Nov 14: American researchers have developed a gun that can fire “sonic bullets” to incapacitate terrorists who try to hijack passenger aircraft, the British weekly New Scientist says.
The idea is to equip plainclothes skymarshalls with the gadget so that they can fire a powerful sonic pulse which temporarily disables the hijacker but does not damage the aircraft, as a conventional gun would.
A prototype of the device has been built by American Technology Corporation, a hi-tech firm based in San Diego, California, and US defence contractor General Dynamics is putting up the cash to develop it and pitch it to the Pentagon, New Scientist says in next Saturday’s issue.
In its lab version, the invention comprises a polymer composite tube about a metre long and four centimetres in diameter.
Inside the tube are a series of piezoelectric discs, each of which acts like a small loudspeaker.
A pulse of sound send by the first disc is picked up and amplified by the second, and so on down the line until a highly-magnified sonic wedge emerges from the other end, powerful enough to cause agonizing pain to the eardrums and disorientation.
“It shoots out a pulse of sound that’s almost like a bullet,” American Technology chairman Elwood Norris said. “It’s over 140 decibels for a second or two.”
Sounds become painful between 120 and 30 decibels.
Norris has tested the system on himself.
“It almost knocked me on my butt. I wasn’t interested in anything for quite a while afterwards,” he was quoted as saying. “You could virtually knock a cow on its back with this.”
A word of caution was expressed by Juergen Altmann, an expert in non-lethal acoustic weapons at the University of Dortmund, Germany.
He said that the beam would not be narrow enough to hit just one person unless they were very close.—AFP
