[JumpCrisscross]

> Aircraft are an interesting case where nobody except state actors can really afford to evaluate their security

Would this be true in countries where aircraft manufacturers aren’t also defence contractors? Or even for American non-defence plane makers, e.g. Cessna?

[azernik]

There is no such thing.

Cessna makes light attack aircraft (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessna_A-37_Dragonfly) and variants of its unarmed aircraft for tasks like forward air control and reconnaissance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessna_O-2_Skymaster)

Beechcraft (formerly a Raytheon subdivision) makes utility aircraft (usually variants of civilian models), trainers, and target drones. They also have a light attack variant (AT-6) of one of their trainers, which as far as I know has not managed to get adopted; and have proposed a from-scratch jet-powered light attack aircraft as part of a USAF competition.

EDIT: And they also use this class of commercial jetliners; the main USAF mid-air refueler is a 767 variant, and the military has a dozen or so C-40s (a 737 variant) for logistics and airborne command posts.

[metaphor]

To be sure: 2 down, 165 to go[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Aircraft_manufacturer...

[azernik]

Did a bit of not-super-random sampling; the only ones I'm seeing that don't produce for the military are kitplane manufacturers and this lovely oddity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrafugia

(And of those kitplane manufacturers, many of them also make drones for the Army and Navy.)

There is just so much overlap between civilian and military models (much more so than in, say motor vehicles) that the line between military and civilian products gets fuzzy.