Most airborne early-warning aircraft announce themselves with a giant spinning disc on their back. The Chilean Air Force’s Cóndor did it with its face. Where a Boeing 707 should have a slim, pointed nose, this one had a huge rounded bulge, as if the airliner had swallowed something too big to get down.

What it had swallowed was a radar. The EB-707 Cóndor, serial 904, carried Israel’s EL/M-2075 Phalcon, one of the first airborne radars to look around without any moving antenna at all. When it arrived in 1995 it gave the Fuerza Aérea de Chile the first airborne early warning and control aircraft in South America.

An Airliner Rebuilt Around a Radar

The airframe had a long life before the radar. It was built as a 707-385C, a passenger and cargo convertible, and first flew on 13 September 1965 under a Boeing registration, N68657. The airline that ordered it never took delivery, and in December 1969 it went to LAN Chile as CC-CEB. The Chilean Air Force bought it in 1990 and sent it to Israel, where Israel Aerospace Industries and Elta rebuilt it around the Phalcon. During the conversion it flew under the Israeli registration 4X-JYI, and it appeared at the Paris Air Show in 1993.

It reached Chile in May 1995 and joined Grupo de Aviación N° 10 at Pudahuel air base, which shares its site with Santiago’s international airport. Chilean media have put the conversion contract at about US$150 million, though other published estimates are much higher. Chile was the only export customer for the 707 version of the Phalcon; Israel flew its own 707 Phalcons.

How a Radar Looks Around Without Moving

The American E-3 Sentry and the Russian A-50 carry their radar antenna in a rotodome that turns several times a minute, so any given target is only illuminated for a moment on each sweep. The Phalcon replaced the rotating dish with fixed, flat antenna arrays built into the aircraft’s skin: one behind the nose radome and others in the long fairings along each side of the fuselage. Some sources also describe a fourth array under the tail, which Chilean sources do not mention.

Each array is an active electronically scanned array, or AESA. Instead of one transmitter and a moving antenna, it is made of hundreds of small solid-state transmit and receive modules, reportedly 768 per array. A computer adjusts the timing of each module so that their signals add up in one direction, steering the beam electronically. The beam can jump from one target to another in a fraction of a second and dwell longer on anything interesting, something a rotating dish cannot do. Chilean sources credit the Cóndor’s radar with detecting a fighter-sized target at around 400 kilometres, and give its coverage as 260 degrees around the aircraft rather than a full circle. It also carried electronic and communications intelligence equipment for listening to radar and radio emissions.

The Deal That Did Not Happen

The Phalcon’s biggest moment in international politics came without the Cóndor. In the late 1990s Israel agreed to fit Phalcon radars to Russian-built A-50 airframes for China. Washington objected strongly, arguing the system could shift the military balance across the Taiwan Strait, and in July 2000 Prime Minister Ehud Barak halted the sale. His successor Ariel Sharon confirmed the cancellation in a letter to Chinese President Jiang Zemin in 2001, and Israel agreed in 2002 to pay China about US$350 million, the advance China had paid plus compensation. China went on to build its own early-warning aircraft, the KJ-2000.

India’s Phalcons

The same radar family found a much bigger customer next door to China. In March 2004 India signed a deal worth about US$1.1 billion for three Phalcon AWACS, this time on Il-76 airframes, designated A-50EI, with the EL/W-2090 radar. Their radome sits on top like a conventional AWACS dish, but it does not rotate: inside it are fixed arrays scanning electronically through 360 degrees. The first A-50EI landed at Jamnagar on 25 May 2009, and all three were in service by March 2011. India approved two more in 2016, but that deal has not been signed. It has since added its own smaller Netra system on Embraer jets.

Retirement, and a Sentry to Replace It

After a quarter of a century the Cóndor was showing its age, both as a 1960s airframe and as a 1990s radar. It made its last operational flights in 2020 and was formally retired in April 2022, appearing on static display at that year’s FIDAE air show in Santiago. Its replacement came from Britain: Chile acquired three retired RAF E-3D Sentries, two to fly and one to strip for spares. The first, the former ZH103, arrived in July 2022 as FACh 905, the serial the Cóndor had originally carried.

The Cóndor itself was dismantled at Pudahuel in the spring of 2025. Not all of it was lost: on 22 July 2025 the nose radome, the cockpit section and parts of the side radar fairings were delivered to Chile’s Museo Nacional Aeronáutico y del Espacio for display.

What the Viral Version Gets Right

The posts now circulating about the Cóndor get the essentials right: the Phalcon radar, the fixed arrays, the 1965 airframe and its LAN Chile past, the 2022 retirement and the E-3D replacement, India’s US$1.1 billion order and the cancelled China deal. Two details need softening. The airframe joined LAN Chile in 1969, four years after it was built. And the claim that the arrays covered all 360 degrees, including one under the tail, is disputed: Chilean sources describe nose and side arrays covering 260 degrees.

Sources: Infodefensa (2025); Aviacionline; Pucará Defensa; Zona Militar; Museo Nacional Aeronáutico y del Espacio (22 July 2025); The War Zone (January 2022); UK Defence Journal; Aviacionline on the E-3D handover (August 2022); Arms Control Association (September 2001); Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs; GlobalSecurity; Livefist Defence (May 2009); Defense Industry Daily; airhistory.net and production records for c/n 19000