News·Paris Air Show 2025

Thales supports airspace sovereignty in Albania with Ground Master 400 Alpha surveillance radar

Published on June 20th, 2025
2 Minute Read
Thales supports airspace sovereignty in Albania with Ground Master 400 Alpha surveillance radar
  • At the Paris Air Show, in the presence of the French Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu and Albanian Defence Minister Pirro Vengu, Thales was awarded a contract to supply a Ground Master 400 Alpha (GM400α) radar, with delivery within 14 months, as part of an air surveillance modernisation programme.
  • Thales has met the strategic request to supply a Ground Master surveillance radar in record time. Renowned for its outstanding reliability, unmatched performance and high mobility, the GM400α plays a critical role in air surveillance worldwide.
  • In the past year, Thales has invested in an industrial ramp-up, tripling production capacity for Ground Master radars in France, to support the increase in air surveillance needs and in particular urgent operational requests.

In the presence of the French Minister of the Armed Forces, Sébastien Lecornu, and Albanian Defence Minister Pirro Vengu, Thales was selected as strategic industrial partner to support a short-delivery-time request to supply a combat-proven Ground Master 400 Alpha (GM400α) air surveillance radar.

To maintain airspace sovereignty, forces need to rely on assets that provide superior situational awareness at all times. Building a reliable, accurate, up-to-date Recognised Air Picture (RAP) is becoming a key challenge.

Renowned for its outstanding reliability, unmatched performance and high mobility, the GM400α plays a critical role in air surveillance worldwide. It is a game changer for air surveillance, with one of the highest performance records on the market. With its full digital architecture, it tracks air threats at a range of up to 515 km, with superior detection of low-altitude targets including slow-moving UAVs.

The current industrial ramp-up and strategy of Thales has tripled production capacity for Ground Master radars and strengthened the supply chain eco-system, providing Thales with the capacity to deliver more than 30 air surveillance radars from the Ground Master family per year and to shorten response times to meet urgent operational requests. To date more than 270 Ground Master air surveillance radars have been sold worldwide.

Katarzyna Żmudzińska
Kasia is an ATM consultant with international experience in technical and regulatory projects gained in consulting companies - Think Research (UK) and EY (Brussels), as well as organisations like European Commission (DG MOVE), Eurocontol and ICAO and most recently a market intelligence expert with FoxATM.
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