Egypt Airshow: Integrated air defence is on Thales’ Radar

The European defence giant is promoting its integrated air defence systems, which it says can handle simultaneous attacks from ballistic missiles to strike aircraft, helicopters and low, slow-flying uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs).

The use of swarms of UAVs in Ukraine has focused the minds of many nations on the problems of defending their airspace against multiple types of attackers, which are often timed to arrive over their targets at the same time, greatly complicating the task of defenders.

Thales is here promoting its Ground Master 200 and 400 radars. The 400 is an air surveillance radar with a range of more than 500km, while the 200 has a detection range of around 250km. However, the latter radar, with a refresh rate of 40 times a minute and the ability to detect UAVs with small radar cross-sections and slow groundspeeds – below the limit for some larger radars – makes it ideal for handling this new threat.

Since the Ground Master range entered service around a decade ago, more than 260 have been sold, said Thales business development manager for land-air systems, Alain Charton.

The radars have two significant qualities, said Charton; they feed into a command and control system to provide an integrated picture of the surrounding airspace and they are ‘system-agnostic’, able to work with a wide range of effectors – missiles or guns – from a variety of suppliers.

“Everybody is connected: everybody knows what the other guys are doing and who is engaging who, to avoid the danger of fratricide,” Charton said. Thales, as a specialist integrator, has an advantage over some competitors that produce only individual systems, he said.

Charton declines to say whether the system has been procured by countries in the Middle East region,  but confirms that there is a new interest in air defence systems: “A few years ago, it was OK; everybody was friends. Now, they are looking for a solution to protect their airspace.”