Active 1947-1952, 1953-1974 | Country United States | |
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Branch United States Air Force Type General Radar Surveillance | ||
The 634th Radar Squadron is an inactive United States Air Force unit. It was last assigned to the 20th Air Division, Aerospace Defense Command, stationed at Lake Charles Air Force Station, Louisiana. It was inactivated on 1 July 1974.
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History
The unit was a General Surveillance Radar squadron providing for the air defense of the United States. It was first activated at McChord AFB, WA as an aircraft control squadron to operate the 505th Aircraft Control & Warning Group's Air Defense Control Center for the Provisional Northwestern Air Defense Sector. It soon moved to the Lashup radar site L-31 at Everett, WA (later Paine Field) and added the detection and control mission as well. It was inactivated in the general reorganization of Air Defense Command (ADC) in February 1952. It was soon reactivated and performed the same mission at the mobile site M-118 at Burns AFS, OR. Became part of the Semi Automatic Ground Environment system in 1962. Inactivated in 1970.
The Squadron was activated again in 1973 to replace Operating Location F of the 630th Radar Squadron at Lake Charles AFS as part of the Southern Air Defense System (SADS). SADS had been established because of the inadequacy of the radar coverage to the south of the United States that had been dramatically illustrated whan a Cuban MiG-17 went undetected before it landed at Homestead AFB, and two years later, an An-24 similarly arrived unannounced at New Orleans International Airport. As a result, ADC established SADS with the squadron operating a manual control center at the Houston ARTCC and added radars to supplement the existing Federal Aviation Administration coverage in the area. However, the squadron was inactivated little more than a year later.
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