India to acquire 4 more Aerostats to track air spies

India to acquire 4 more Aerostats to track air spies

NEW DELHI: India is going to acquire four more Aerostat radars from Israel to bolster its ability to detect and track hostile low-flying aircraft, helicopters, spy drones and missiles. The Aerostat radars will help in plugging holes in the country’s far-from-impregnable airspace, especially with central and peninsular India being quite devoid of medium-level and low-level radar coverage, as reported by TOI earlier. The "gaps" in the radar network, in fact, can even be exploited by terrorist outfits like LTTE, which recently demonstrated its capability to mount air strikes by using low-flying propeller aircraft in Sri Lanka. While the decision to buy more Aerostat radars may be good, the not-so-good news is that India’s $1.1 billion project to acquire three "Phalcon" AWACS (airborne warning and control systems) from Israel has run into some rough weather. As per the March 2004 contract, the first AWACS was to be delivered to India in November 2007 after integration of the Israeli Phalcon early-warning radar and communication system with the Russian IL-76 heavy transport aircraft. The second and the third ones were to follow nine months and 15 months after that. "But there is a delay due to technical reasons... IAF might get the first AWACS in February 2008 now if everything goes as per schedule," a defence ministry source said. Both AWACS and Aerostat radars (phased-array radars mounted on blimp-like balloons tethered to ground) act as "eyes in the skies" since they can detect air intrusions much earlier than ground-based radars. The four more Aerostat radars is a follow-on order to the successful deployment of the two EL/M-2083 Aerostat radars, inducted from Israel in 2004-2005, along the border in Kutch region and Punjab. In all, IAF has projected a requirement of 13 Aerostat radars, with each one capable of providing three-dimensional low-altitude coverage equal to 30-40 ground-based radars. Incidentally, Pakistan too is acquiring six Aerostat L-88 radar systems from the US in an estimated $155-million deal. IAF, on its part, also plans to acquire a wide array of LLTRs (low-level transportable radars), LLLWRs (low-level light weight radars), CARs (central acquisition radars) and SARs (synthetic aperture radars) over the next five years to improve its air defence capabilities. Most of these requirements are being sourced from Israel, which has emerged as India’s second-largest defence supplier with annual sales worth almost $1 billion. Interestingly, the EL/M-2083 Aerostat radars are simpler versions of the EL/M-2080 Green Pine radars, which are an integral part of the Israeli Arrow-2 BMD (ballistic missile defence) systems. India has used the two Green Pine radars, imported from Israel in 2001-2002, to develop its own long-range tracking radar which was used in last year’s test of an indigenous "exo-atmospheric" BMD system.