A civil airliner carrying nothing but extra wiring and a bigger power supply counts as a munition under American law, and on Friday the US State Department fixed that with 74 characters. The aircraft caught this way are flown by civilian airlines, by heads of state, by humanitarian organisations and by the United Nations. Most have never been American. The control was never following the airframe. It follows the anti-missile kit bolted into it, and it follows that kit worldwide. The Department concedes the position in the rule’s own preamble. “The Department notes that aircraft modified to facilitate incorporation of ASE are currently described in paragraph (a)(8) even when the ASE is not physically present in the aircraft.” ASE is aircraft survivability equipment. Anti-missile kit. The wiring and the power supply are fitted to feed it, and on that reading they put the whole airframe on the United States Munitions List with no kit aboard at all. The fix adds “excluding survivability-enhanced aircraft (see § 121.0 of this subchapter)” to Category VIII(a)(8). That is 74 characters as the Federal Register printed them. Effective 13 October. Comments close 28 September, fifteen days before it takes effect. What has not changed is the reach, and the reach was never in this rule. A US-origin defense article stays under American control after it is built into something that is not controlled, and anyone abroad who takes custody of it is bound by the same rules “regardless of the number of intermediate transfers”. A foreign airline moving its own foreign-registered aircraft between two foreign countries has needed written American approval to do it. Not because the aircraft is American. Because the pod is. Repairing that wiring for a foreign operator stays a defense service too, though wiring and power supplies are ordinary civilian export goods. On why now, the preamble gives one clause, and it arrives as the reason a narrower fix was rejected. The Department had considered limiting the exclusion to kit designed against shoulder-fired missiles. It did not, because its “review of civil aircraft losses concluded that the threat is no longer limited to MANPADS”. It names no incident.