Kalispell Air Force Station
Open-knowledge reference entry
Kalispell Air Force Station (ADC ID: TM-179, NORAD ID: Z-179) is a closed United States Air Force General Surveillance Radar station. It is located 13.3 miles (21.4 km) south of Kalispell, Montana near the community of Lakeside.
It was closed in 1978 by the Air Force, and the radar site on Blacktail Mountain was turned over to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Today the radar site is part of the Joint Surveillance System (JSS), designated by NORAD as Western Air Defense Sector (WADS) Ground Equipment Facility J-78. The former garrison site at 501 Blacktail Road in Lakeside was acquired by Youth With A Mission in 1985, with the remaining eight houses previously retained by the Air Force for local military recruiters acquired by YWAM via GSA auction in 1992.
History
Kalispell Air Force Station came into existence as part of Phase III of the Air Defense Command Mobile Radar program. On 20 October 1953 ADC requested a third phase of twenty-five radar sites be constructed.
The 716th Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron was assigned to the new station on 1 May 1959. The squadron started operations with an AN/FPS-7B search radar and a pair of AN/FPS-90 height-finder radars in 1961, and initially the station functioned as a Ground-Control Intercept (GCI) and warning station. As a GCI station, the squadron's role was to guide interceptor aircraft toward unidentified intruders picked up on the unit's radar scopes.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kalispell Air Force Station” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.