Raytheon to build radar not fooled by wind farms

Telegraph:

The wind turbines, which can reach 110m, can move at more than 160mph, and the movement can create blind spots for pilots trying to land aircraft.

Wind farms can create distortion on radar screens and as the number of farms has increased, so has the number of radar "blackout zones", meaning that aircraft passing through the area can effectively disappear with air traffic controllers losing their exact position.

Now the National Air Traffic Services (Nats), the body that monitors British airspace, has asked Raytheon, the American defence company, to design the world's first system to enable radar to avoid this interference.

Raytheon, the largest manufacturer of radar systems in the world, hopes to complete the £5 million project by the end of next year.

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"Smaller wind farms have generally presented fewer problems but the need to find a solution becomes more pressing as applications for larger and larger windfarms, including offshore, as proposed.

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Brian Smith, general manager of Raytheon Canada, said: "Our work will be to develop the algorithms that allow us to discriminate between turbines and aircraft. It is called clutter erasure."

Last week, Europe's biggest onshore wind farm, was switched on at Whitelee in Scotland. ScottishPower's 140-turbine farm in East Renfrewshire is said to be capable of generating enough energy to power 180,000 homes.

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The offshore wind farms make the problem strategic because they hamper the ability to determine if aircraft are approaching from the sea. In the case of an enemy attack the blackout zones could make a sneak attack on the country easier. The internal aviation could be handled by air traffic controllers, but the external threat could have significant ramifications.