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Sniper pods touted as video growth area

Iraq and Afghanistan might be underscoring the need for more unmanned aircraft equipped with full-motion video cameras, but the Air Force and one of its contractors, Lockheed Martin, are pushing equally hard to get video cameras on hundreds of piloted fighters, bombers and attack aircraft.

At its plant in Orlando, Fla., Lockheed is cranking out the 400-pound Sniper Advanced Targeting Pods (ATPs) at a rate of 10 per month, said Mark Fischer, a former F-15 pilot who heads Lockheed’s business development for fixed-wing targeting systems.

For Lockheed, these cameras, which are controlled by pilots inside their cockpits, are not a stop-gap measure until UAVs are ready. “We see the ATP business as a growth business,” Fischer said.

A-10C pilots in Afghanistan recently began using the pods on close-air-support missions. The Air Force is testing the pods on B-52 aircraft at Barksdale Air Force Base, La. Some B-1s carry the pods, as do versions of the F-15 and F-16s.

Lockheed is more than halfway through the Air Force’s current order of 544 pods, and the company anticipates an additional order for 50, Fischer said.

Possible improvements are in the works. Engineers are testing the idea of adding a John Madden-inspired “telestrator” capability to the laptop computers pilots rely on to control the camera views. If it works, an Air Force Joint Terminal Attack Controller equipped with a ROVER 5 video terminal could mark up a video clip to point out a target, and the markings would automatically appear on a pilot’s screen, Fischer said.

Fischer is confident the Air Force will sign up. “I think a blind man can see it coming,” he said.

For now, the Sniper videos usually bypass the video-analysis infrastructure that the Air Force and other services are setting up in the name of delivering the video quickly to troops under fire. Fischer said he expects Sniper videos to eventually be more common on the displays of intelligence analysts at Distributed Common Ground/Surface Stations.

“In some cases, there’s some concept of employment work that would need to be done by the customer,” he said.