🇺🇦 How Ukraine turned mobile phone microphones into an air defence network

While modern air defences are designed to effectively target limited numbers of large, highly-capable fighter and bomber aircraft using costly precision missiles, such systems are proving unsuitable for protecting friendly airspace against large quantities of small suicide drones – formally known as one-way UAVs.

These small vehicles fly low and slow, and cost just a fraction of what a high-end anti-aircraft missile does. Attempting to target waves of one-way UAVs with conventional air defences would quickly exhaust the limited supply of munitions.

Compounding the problem is how low such vehicles fly – as little as 200ft above ground level, according to the European headquarters of the US Air Force.

At such minuscule heights, the curvature of the Earth makes it so that conventional air defence radars can only track objects at a distance of around 10nm (18.5km), according to General James Hecker, the commander of US Air Forces in Europe.

Ukraine’s solution to this problem is a novel approach that targets the acoustic signature of incoming aerial threats.

Kyiv has deployed a system called Sky Fortress throughout the country to detect and triangulate one-way UAVs by listening for them. Hecker says the network deployed in Ukraine includes 9,500 ground-based microphones that match sounds in the environment to known audio signatures of aerial vehicles.

Once threats have been identified, more affordable defences can be deployed against the slow moving drones, such as man-portable air defence missiles like the Raytheon FIM-92 Stinger or anti-aircraft batteries like the German Gepard system.

🔗 https://www.flightglobal.com/military-uavs/how-ukraine-turned-mobile-phone-microphones-into-an-air-defence-network/159997.article

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