RAF Fylingdales

RAF Fylingdales is a British Air Force station on the SNOD Hill in the North York Moors. The motto of the station is Vigilamus (Latin for " We wake up "). The radar station is part of the US-led Ballistic Missile Early Warning System ( BMEWS, early warning system for ballistic missiles), whose purpose is to warn of an impending missile attack. During the Cold War, this was the so-called four - minute warning.

BMEWS

RAF Fylingdales, together with the American radars on the Thule Air Base in Greenland and the Clear Air Force Station in Alaska BMEWS the network of the United States. The data collected by the British and the Americans accrue to the North American Aerospace Defense Command ( NORAD ) to.

The radar system

The primary radars in Fylingdales RAF are Active Electronically Scanned Array, which are mounted in the sides of a pyramid called truncated tetrahedron, which Fylingdales allows only one of the stations a 360 ° radar coverage. Each page contains about 2560 transceiver units whose total power is about 2.5 MW at a range of more than 4500 kilometers.

History

The station was by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) built in 1962 and managed by the British arm. They then consisted of three geodesic radomes of 40 meters in diameter with mechanically controlled radar equipment. The station became a tourist destination; the Busausflüglern was demonstrated among other things, the board radios that radar stations interfered with the radio reception.

From 1989 to 1992, Raytheon built around the plant.

Since the late 1990s, the U.S. missile defense shield ( National Missile Defense NMD) has replaced the Strategic Defense Initiative ( SDI), RAF Fylingdales is again talking point. In order to better monitor missile launches in Africa and the Middle East, the U.S. wanted to incorporate the station into the NMD, which approved the British government in 2003. Since then, there have been repeated demonstrations of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND ) and other protest organizations.

Rebuilding

To adjust Fylingdales to the NMD program, including the computer equipment of the station of Boeing with the subcontractor Raytheon to be rebuilt at an estimated cost of 449 million pounds. The Ministry of Defence denies in this context reports the Independent on Sunday, after which the Blair government had agreed to the deployment of missile defense systems.

Others

The song " Fylingdale Flyer" of the rock band Jethro Tull, released in 1980 on the album " A" refers textually to the early warning system and provides them so far in question, as the plant will still operated by people who misinterpret the displays of radar equipment could, 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 did red telephone "

"You have the system checked and they were fine / is probably blown only a small fuse / Lean on you back, it will go by / let ' the fingers of the Red Phone "