Determining the Orbit Locations of Turkish Airborne Early Warning and Control Aircraft Over the Turkish Air Space

The technology improvement affects the military needs of individual countries. The new doctrine of defense for many countries emphasizes detecting threats as far away as you can from your homeland. Today, the military uses both ground RADAR and Airborne Early Warning and Control (AEW&C) Aircraft. AEW&C aircraft has become vital to detect low altitude threats that a ground RADAR cannot detect because of obstacles on the earth. Turkey has ordered four AEW&C aircraft for her air defense system because of the lack of complete coverage by ground RADAR. This research provides optimal orbit locations that can be updated according to the threats, for Turkish AEW&C aircraft in the combat arena. Three combat scenarios Turkey might encounter are examined. Turkey can expect threats from everywhere. The worst cases for these scenarios include bad weather conditions and in Electronic Counter Measure (ECM) environment, adversary Surface to Air Missile (SAM) sites which are located in areas unknown to Turkish intelligence and no Suppression of Enemy Air Defense (SEAD) aircraft which can eliminate the SAM sites using High Speed Anti-Radiation Missiles (HARM). The concern is to cover and detect the threats as far as possible from Turkey within a risk that the commander accepts. The goal is to help decision makers decide how many AEW aircraft are needed to obtain full coverage. In order to provide optimum results, a Maximal Coverage Location Problem technique is used and the model is coded in MATLAB® 2008a