Use of Airborne Radar

An additional and unique application of the Search and Rescue Synthetic Aperture Radar program of the Goddard Space Flight Center might be in the search for such long lost aircraft. There are hundreds of square miles of remote swamp area or mountainous terrain that are difficult to search or even penetrate by foot. During the test and development of this radar system, known areas where there is an above average concentration of suspected military airplane crashes could be evaluated for possible overflight and monitoring.

Such detection of actual wreckages can contribute to the continued development of automated target detection in the Search and Rescue processing system. Here is an actual application of searching for specific aircraft, who's precise location is unknown. With the cooperation of interested organizations such as Tidewater Tech, these highly probable sites could then be individually evaluated and analyzed by visual inspection. This would most nearly simulate the actual search for a downed and missing aircraft, while at the same time, provide additional benefit in the possible identification and likely recovery of an historic aircraft, that could find its way into a museum for future generations to enjoy. Unless these crashed remains are recovered from such remote areas, they will continue to deteriorate and eventually corrode so badly that any type of restoration will become completely impractical.

There are many likely regions throughout the United States that could be selected for such testing. Often actual aircraft are transported to a test site for analysis of the target return of a known airplane. These could just as easily be done near such selected military regions and evaluated alongside large desolate tracts of land, that will also allow more accurate and realistic testing in the detection of such earlier aircraft crashes.

Eventually such an airborne detection system will become fully functional and highly practical. It is hoped that tests such as these along the way would contribute to the overall successful development of such a system. Even though its primary purpose will continue to be that of saving lives in the precious hours immediately after a survivable airplane crash, this is just one example of another economic and social benefit of such a system.