South Korea announces development of conformal antenna for stealth aircraft

South Korea's Agency for Defense Development (ADD) announced on 23 November that it has developed a new conformal antenna design to improve the low-visibility profile of stealth aircraft.

The agency said in a statement that it had succeeded in locally developing a small conformal antenna, which is optimised to stealth aircraft's airframe design and which will help reduce an aircraft's radar cross-section, thus making it less detectable by enemy radars.

ADD noted that the new technology was developed in collaboration with Hanwha Systems under a four-year project launched by South Korea's Defense Acquisition Program Administration in 2017.

ADD said that the conformal antenna, which leverages the active phased-array antenna design, can work in several frequency bands in use by military communication equipment, and that additional research will be conducted to develop a broadband, compact, and lightweight conformal antenna that can be used in wider frequency bands.

The latest development comes after ADD announced progress in the local development of important technologies, new aerial structure design technology, as well as flight control algorithms for stealth unmanned aerial vehicles, in September.