Swiss air space to be monitored by French system

Thales’ command and control system is not the only one keeping an eye on Swiss planes. © Keystone / Jean-christophe Bott

Switzerland has signed a contract to buy the Skyview airspace surveillance and mission control system from the French supplier Thales.

As part of the army’s Air 2030 procurement programme, the Swiss air force’s existing airspace surveillance and mission control systems will be replaced. After parliament approved the French system as part of the Armed Forces Dispatch 2020, the purchase contract has now been signed, Armasuisse, the federal office for defence procurement, said in a statementExternal link on Thursday. No price was given.

Skyview will be implemented on the data centres of the defence ministry. The introduction will begin in the mid-2020s.

The government decided in favour of Skyview in September 2019. The French supplier Thales beat out two other bidders – Saab from Sweden and Raytheon from the US – after 12 months of testing in Switzerland.

Skyview is to replace the two subsystems Ralus and Lunas. While Ralus (a radar system) collects the data and creates a picture of the situation in the air, Lunas (an air messaging system) displays all the data on screen to support the mission command.