Switzerland Receives Bids for Airspace Surveillance System

(Source: Swiss Dept. of Defence, Civil Protection and Sport; issued Feb 18, 2019)

BERN --- On 11 February 2019, the three successful candidates submitted to armasuisse their offers for the new airspace surveillance system. The submission of offers marks the beginning of the evaluation phase.

The current Ralus / Lunas air handling and driving system needs to be replaced. In this perspective, experts from Armasuisse and the Air Force have tested three replacement systems in three different countries in Dübendorf over the last six months. The tests focused on the functionality of the flight path calculators as well as the management capabilities of civil and military air traffic.

The three bidders, namely Thales (France), Saab (Sweden) and Raytheon (USA), have now forwarded their offers to armasuisse. The submission of these offers marks the beginning of the evaluation phase during which armasuisse will evaluate the offers, draw up an evaluation report and submit to the Air2030 program management a recommendation concerning the choice of system.

The Florako airspace surveillance and command system

Ralus and Lunas are subsystems of the current Florako airspace and driving monitoring system. Ralus (Radar Luftlage-System) collects the data and establishes the image of the air situation, while Lunas (Luftlage-Nachrichtensystem) reproduces all the data on the screen in order to support the conduct of the engagement in its actions.

Florako is intended to identify civil and military aerial objects (eg airplanes, helicopters and drones) and to conduct Air Force engagements, including ground-to-air defense. Since 2005, Swiss airspace has been monitored 24 hours a day by Florako.

Link with the Air2030 program

The Air2030 program includes not only the plans for the next combat aircraft and the new long-range air defense system, but also the C2Air and Radar projects. These two projects concern the progressive replacement or upgrading of the mentioned Florako components. They are older and will be the subject of a request to Parliament in separate weapons programs.

Maintaining the value of the Florako radar detectors has been approved with the 2016 weapons program.

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