Note: I only have limited experience with ATC Radar (small number of models in the US). Based on my experience, ATC Radar have no difficulty seeing commercial

Note: I only have limited experience with ATC Radar (small number of models in the US). Based on my experience, ATC Radar have no difficulty seeing commercial aircraft with a high probability of detection and low probability of false alarm. Source: completed a performance assessment of several such systems in the early 2000s against their legacy counterparts using aircraft beacon systems as a source of “truth”. If I remember to come back to this later, I’ll write a little post showing the theoretical detection performance of such a system. If you’d like to try the exercise yourself, the relevant worksheet is a Blake Chart and you can look up surrogate parameters for the Radar via checking the ASR-XX pages on Wikipedia (e.g. ASR-9 or ASR-11). Finding Radar cross sections (RCS) for commercial aircraft models is similarly straightforward. The system is logarithmic so as long as you’re in the ballpark you’ll be close.