Indra to install Asia's first 3D Civil Radar in South Korea

Indra will implement the first 3D civil aviation radar to enter into service throughout Asia in South Korea to reinforce air safety on one of the busiest and most complex routes to manage in the world: the A593 airway, which connects Japan with China and South Korea, and is the gateway for flights from North America.

This route crosses the China Sea from east to west and is itself traversed by the air corridor that connects Korea with all the East Asian countries and Indonesia.

The company will install this long-range 3D radar on the Korean island of Jeju. The reliability and accuracy of these systems can enhance safety on routes with a high volume of traffic such as this one, as well as in cities with several airports or areas in which the presence of wind farms generates interference with conventional radars.

The system will operate in combination with a fully digitalized secondary radar and an ADS-B surveillance system that collects the information automatically sent by aircraft in flight. The merging of all the data provided by Indra’s sensors will offer a much more precise vision and improve safety.

Three-dimensional radars are the only ones capable of completely independently determining the altitude at which an aircraft is flying, unlike traditional ones, which interrogate the aircraft to collect this information.

They’re radars that electronically sweep the entire airspace they’re monitoring with hundreds of independent energy pulses. “It’s as if multiple radars were working in coordination to determine the longitude, latitude and elevation of each aircraft”, the company explains.

With a range of over 220 miles, the system will reinforce surveillance to the south of the island of Jeju and reach as far as the Atoti point, where the Korean controllers hand over the flights to their Chinese counterparts.

The signal’s advanced digital processing will allow operations under the most extreme weather conditions, eliminating noise and interference to ensure the very best vision.

This is the third radar that Indra has installed on the island of Jeju, having previously installed a secondary radar and later a primary 2D approach radar. The company also won a major contract in Korea in 2015 to modernize the navigation, surveillance and air traffic management systems at Incheon Airport in Seoul.

Indra is the world pioneer in the deployment of 3D radars suited to the needs of civil aviation. The company is implementing these systems in some of the most advanced countries in terms of air navigation.

The digital sky of the future

Air traffic is recovering fast and it will soon return to the levels of 2019 prior to the pandemic. Once again there’s an urgent need to modernize air traffic management worldwide so as to gain efficiency and reduce the enormous costs generated each year by delays at airports. There is also the challenge of reducing CO2 emissions to a minimum to ensure the sustainability of the industry.

Indra is revolutionizing air navigation with the introduction of new technologies in artificial intelligence, cloud computing, system virtualization, cybersecurity and virtual reality.

It’s currently digitalizing the operating system of Eurocontrol, Europe’s main air navigation agency. It will equip the integrated Network Manager (iNM) with state-of-the-art tools so that it can continue to monitor traffic in 43 states and at more than 500 airports.

In parallel, Indra is developing next-generation solutions within the Sesar JU program and it deploys its air traffic systems in the world’s largest control centers. It’s also a pioneer in the deployment of remote air traffic control towers and management systems for the traffic of unmanned aircraft in U-Space.