Radar System

The federal government has decided to install at Baltimore-Washington International Airport a new kind of radar that should make it possible to build a second long runway to accommodate growth and attract new airline service."

It must have been the hand-eye. Nestled in that bosun's body, concealed in those meaty arms, lurking behind those tiny, narrow-set eyes there had to be something akin to a radar system -- computer driven, of course, so precisely engineered it could rIt must have been the hand-eye. Nestled in that bosun's body, concealed in those meaty arms, lurking behind those tiny, narrow-set eyes there had to be something akin to a radar system -- computer driven, of course, so precisely engineered it could read the rotation on the ball, solve the intercept problem, flash the correct coordinates down the arms to the wrists while simultaneously unleashing the full strength of the trunk, all this in less than three-hundredths of a second.

At first, Army Pvt. Joseph Lockard thought something was wrong with his equipment. Never in the six months he had been operating the Signal Corps Radio-270 Radio Detection and Ranging (read: radar) system in Hawaii had he seen such a large indication on the screen."But I made some checks and everything was working," Mr. Lockard recalled last week. "Then I saw [the line] moving and I knew something was there."The time was shortly after 7 a.m. on Dec. 7, 1941. What was there turned out to be a wave of Japanese bombers, heading for the U.S. naval station at Pearl Harbor.

Development and production of AWACS, the Airborne Early Warning and Control System that has been one of the biggest programs in the history of Westinghouse's Anne Arundel County defense complex, is nearing an end after a run of nearly 20 years.During the massive bombing attacks on Iraq it was not unusual for 200 or more Allied warplanes to be airborne at a time. Serving as the Air Force's traffic cop in the sky was the airborne radar system built by workers at the Westinghouse Electric Corp.

WASHINGTON -- The Iraqi missile that slammed into an American military barracks in Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf war, killing 28 people, penetrated air defenses because a computer failure shut down the American missile system designed to counter it, two Army investigations have concluded.The Iraqi Scud missile hit the barracks in Al Khobar near Dhahran on Feb. 25, causing the war's single worst casualty toll for Americans. The allied Central Command said the next day that no Patriot missile had been fired to intercept the Scud, adding that the Scud had broken into pieces as it descended and was not identified as a threat by the Patriot radar system.

It has to be an air traffic controller's nightmare. Planes -- hundreds of them -- zipping back and forth across the sky. Some of them are moving at twice the speed of sound, while others are designed to be invisible.It is like monitoring all the air traffic at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, as well as those in New York, Chicago and Atlanta combined.In the Persian Gulf war there are days when as many as 3,000 aircraft are sent out on various missions, and it is not unusual for 600 planes to be in the air at once.

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon has interrupted field tests of a new high-technology radar plane and dispatched it to the Persian Gulf, where it could play a key role in tracking the movement of Iraqi ground forces during a Mideast war, U.S. officials said yesterday.The JSTARS planes -- short for Joint Surveillance and Targeting Acquisition Radar System -- were designed for use in monitoring troops and tanks in Europe. But six years before they were to formally enter the U.S. arsenal, two of the modified Boeing 707s -- bristling with electronic surveillance equipment -- have arrived in Saudi Arabia for potential war duty.

Baltimore-Washington International Airport is among 30 U.S. airports slated to get a sophisticated radar system which will help track planes on the ground when visibility is difficult.Bill Buck, assistant air traffic manager for BWI, said the system, called Airport Surface Detection Equipment, "scans at a very fast update rate and it provides a radar map of the entire airport."Buck said he did not know when BWI will have the equipment because installation has been postponed several times.

A new radar system designed to keep track of taxiing airplanes might have prevented Monday's fiery ground collision near Detroit if it had been operating there, the national spokesmen for air traffic controllers and airlines said.The Airport Surface Detection Equipment or ASDE-3, a $3 million radar system that was supposed to begin operating this month at Pittsburgh but has developed technical problems, is scheduled to be installed over the next three years at 29 other major airports around the country, including Detroit.

The Linthicum-based Westinghouse Electronic Systems Group and another local company played a key role in saving the royal family of Kuwait from the Iraqi forces in August.A tethered balloon produced by Columbia-based TCOM L.P. and equipped with a radar system made by Westinghouse alerted the emir and his family to the pending invasion.Westinghouse chairman and chief executive officer Paul E. Lego yesterday cited the incident as an example of the importance of producing reliable products for customers.