RAF Fylingdales
RAF Fylingdales is a British Royal Air Force base on Snod Hill in the North York Moors in North Yorkshire , England . The station's motto is Vigilamus (Latin for “We watch”). The radar station is part of the US- led Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS), the purpose of which is to warn of an imminent missile attack. During the Cold War , this was the so-called 4-minute warning.
BMEWS
RAF Fylingdales, together with the US radar facilities at Thule Air Base in Greenland and at Clear Air Force Station in Alaska, form the US BMEWS network. The data collected by the British and the Americans will flow to the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).
The radar system
The primary radar systems in RAF Fylingdales are Active Electronically Scanned Arrays , which are mounted in the sides of a truncated tetrahedron called a pyramid , which Fylingdales is the only one of the stations to allow 360 ° radar coverage. Each of the pages contains approx. 2560 transmitter / receiver units with a total output of around 2.5 MW with a range of more than 4500 kilometers.
history
The station was built in 1962 by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and administered by its British arm. At that time it consisted of three geodetic radomes with a diameter of 40 meters with mechanically controlled radar systems. The station became a tourist destination; The bus trippers were shown, among other things, using the on-board radio that the radar stations were interfering with radio reception.
From 1989 to 1992 Raytheon rebuilt the facility.
Since the US missile shield (National Missile Defense, NMD) replaced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in the late 1990s , RAF Fylingdales has been a talking point again. In order to better monitor missile launches in Africa and the Middle East, the US wanted to incorporate the station into the NMD, which the British government approved in 2003. Since then, there have been repeated demonstrations by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and other protest organizations.
modification
To adapt Fylingdales to the NMD program, among other things, the computer systems of the station will be rebuilt by Boeing with subcontractor Raytheon for an estimated cost of 449 million British pounds. The UK Ministry of Defense denies reports in the Independent on Sunday that the Blair administration approved the deployment of missile defense systems.
Others
The song "Fylingdale Flyer" by the rock band Jethro Tull , released in 1980 on the album "A", refers to the early warning system and calls it into question insofar as the system is still operated by people who misinterpret the readings from the radar devices and that technical defects could be misinterpreted as actual signals:
"They checked the systems through and they read ao.k. / Some tiny fuse has probably blown / Sit back; relax and soon it will just go away / Keep your hands off that red telephone "
"They checked the systems and they were ok / Probably only a small fuse has blown / Lean back, it will pass / Keep your hands off the red phone "
Web links
Individual evidence
Coordinates: 54 ° 21 '34.4 " N , 0 ° 40' 5.9" W.