Taj Mahal will get a watchful eye right over its dome to keep a tab on possible aerial attacks to the 17th century monument of love.
NEW DELHI: Taj Mahal will get a watchful eye right over its dome to keep a tab on possible aerial attacks to the 17th century monument of love.
IAF will deploy its newly-acquired Aerostat radar for strengthening the security cover over Taj Mahal in Agra from the third dimension to ward off any threat from aerial platforms similar to 9/11 WTC twin tower attacks.
"We are planning to deploy an Aerostat radar specifically for providing aerial security coverage to the Taj Mahal," a senior IAF officer said on Sunday.
Aerostat radars are early warning and control phased-array radars mounted on balloons, tethered to the ground and designed to detect hostile approaching aircraft from afar, especially when they fly at low altitudes.
IAF plans to put one of these radars in its inventory over Agra, as it found that the present assets in place for Taj Mahal's aerial security were inadequate to tackle threat from low-flying aircraft.
Such straying civilian aircraft were used by terror mastermind Osama bin Laden's men to bring down the twin WTC towers in New York on September 11, 2001, an event which led to the US' "War on Terror" campaign in Afghanistan.
The Lankan guerrilla group LTTE's newly-acquired air capabilities that have attacked the island nation's airbases have also made India wake up to aerial threats from non-state actors to its vital installations and infrastructure.
India will also receive the first of the PHALCON AWACS from Israel by February 2009. Both AWACS and Aerostat radars will act as "eyes in the skies" since they can detect air intrusions much earlier than ground-based radars.
AWACS too would be stationed at Agra. The IAF first procured Aerostat radars in 2004-05 from Israel and deployed them in plains of Punjab and Rann of Kutch.
Each Aerostat provides three-dimensional low-altitude coverage equal to 35-40 ground-based radars. The IAF plans to acquire a variety of other radars over the next decade to fill in the gap in radar coverage nationwide.
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