Probability of Detecting Aircraft Targets

The statistics of aircraft radar cross section (RCS) are estimated by fitting members of the chi-square family of distributions to empirical distributions obtained from blocks of RCS data, each block of data corresponding to a particular aircraft azimuth aspect. The parameters of the fitted distributions vary with azimuth aspect angle, type of aircraft, and radar frequency. Detection probabilities based on the estimated statistics are calculated and compared with detection probabilities based on Rayleigh statistics. This comparison indicates that the average value of radar cross section has much more effect on probability of detection than the normalized variance of RCS, and in the usual situation tends to mask the effect of the normalized variance on probability of detection.