After a competitive procurement process, Accipiter Radar Corporation has been chosen by the United States Air Force (USAF) to supply their patented Accipiter® TS1-24D-XE 3D Avian Radar System to Wake Island Airfield, located on Wake Island (also known as Wake Atoll), remotely located in the Pacific Ocean.
Accipiter has spent over a decade working with the US Department of Defense (DoD) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to pioneer affordable avian radar solutions that provide situational awareness and decision support to assist military and civil airport personnel in mitigating the risk of bird strikes.
“We are excited to be working with the USAF and its team at Wake Island to enhance aviation safety and support their Bird Aircraft Strike Hazard (BASH) program”, stated Jeff Ogden, CAPT, USCG (Ret.), Accipiter’s VP of Homeland Security & Safety Programs. “As a retired military pilot myself, we look forward to providing the USAF with tactical tools that will allow them to alert pilots to hazardous bird conditions on approach and departure.”
Accipiter’s family of avian radars are software-definable and have been designed to provide user-selectable, 3D (latitude, longitude, altitude) surveillance of the airspace. This flexibility means that an airfield-specific operational concept can be deployed, matched to the flight operations carried out there. This capability will be particularly valuable at Wake Island. Due to the low number of flight operations, the airspace can be scanned for concentrations of birds in advance of each approach and departure.