NORAD dismisses National Security concerns but is still set to again track the flight of Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.
For more than 50 years, NORAD and its predecessor, the Continental Air Defence Command (CONAD) have tracked Santa's flight. The tradition began in 1955 after a Colorado Springs-based Sears Roebuck & Co. advertisement for children to call Santa misprinted the telephone number. Instead of reaching Santa, the phone number put kids through to the CONAD Commander-in-Chief's operations "hotline." Read more
This year you can count down the days to Santa's takeoff with the official NORAD Tracks Santa app. Enjoy playing "Elf Toss" throughout the month. Read more
There's a lot of stuff floating around earth. Orbiting our planet is everything from satellites and a space station, to junk dropped by astronauts with butterfingers. If the space shuttle slams into one of them - it's gonna hurt. That's where NORAD and NORTHCOM come in. They track all that stuff, and tell NASA when it's safe to launch. Read more
The Western Air Defence Sector covers three-quarters of the country - everything west of the Mississippi River. That's 3,300 miles of border. The sector has 230 military members. At any one time, a little more than two dozen technicians and officers are in that control room. Juliana D'Aprile is among the first line of technicians who assess the radar blips. Behind her is an array of other technicians and officers, eventually leading to a weapons section for scrambling jets. It used to be, back in the Cold War days, that we worried about Russian bombers and nuclear missiles coming across the Arctic. That's why the United States and Canada created NORAD, which stands for the North American Aerospace Defence Command. Canadian military personnel also work at the Lewis-McChord air-defence control room. Read more
North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) is a joint organisation of Canada and the United States that provides aerospace warning, air sovereignty, and defence for the two countries. In the early 1950s the U.S. and Canada agreed to construct a series of radar stations across North America to detect a Soviet attack over the Arctic. The command and control of the massive system became a significant challenge. Discussions and studies of joint systems had been ongoing since the early 1950s and culminated on August 1, 1957, with the announcement by the U.S. and Canada to establish an integrated command, the North American Air Defence Command. Read more