The Spanish technology conglomerate Indra will implement in South Korea the first 3D civil aviation radar to enter service throughout Asia, which will reinforce air safety on one of the busiest and most complex to manage routes in the world: the A593 airway, which connects Japan with China and South Korea and is the gateway for flights from North America.
It is a route that crosses the China Sea from east to west and is in turn crossed by the airway linking Korea to all East Asian countries and Indonesia.
The company will install this long-range 3D radar on the Korean island of Jeju. The reliability and precision offered by these systems allow extreme safety on routes with a high volume of traffic such as this one, as well as in cities with several airports or areas where the presence of wind farms generates interference in conventional radars.
The system will operate in combination with a fully digitized secondary radar and an ADS-B surveillance system, which automatically collects the information emitted by aircraft in flight. The fusion of all the data provided by Indra’s sensors will offer a much more accurate view and multiply safety.
The three-dimensional radars are the only ones capable of completely autonomously determining the altitude at which an aircraft is flying, unlike traditional radars, which interrogate the aircraft to collect this information.
They are radars that electronically sweep the entire airspace they monitor with hundreds of independent pulses of energy. «It is as if multiple radars were working in coordination to determine the position in longitude, latitude, and elevation of each aircraft,» the company explains.
With a range of more than 220 miles, the system will enhance surveillance south of Jeju Island, reaching as far as the Atoti point where Korean controllers transfer flights to their Chinese counterparts.
The advanced digital signal processing will allow operation under the most extreme weather conditions, eliminating noise and interference to ensure the best vision.
This is the third radar that Indra has installed on Jeju Island, after having installed a secondary radar and later a primary 2D approach radar. Also in Korea, the company won a major contract in 2015 to modernize the navigation, surveillance, and traffic management systems at Incheon Airport in Seoul.
