Forum: F-16 Armament & Stores

Hello Guys/gals,

I have a question and being a new member/poster, I hope I dont get fried here asking... In a lot of the recent pics I have seen online of LANTIRN equiped F-16's, almost all of them are only carrying the targeting pod (AAQ-14) while the AAQ-13 Nav pod and pylon are missing.
Can somebody who really knows tell me why? I'll try and attach a link to this thread of 388th A/C showing what I'm talking about, and if somebody from Hill could answer that would be cool too.

Thanks in advance.

http://photobucket.com/albums/a396/Afte ... 21st%20FS/

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We no longer carry the nav pod. NVG's made them unnecessary. I think that happened sometime around the 02-03 timeframe, but I'm not sure of the exact date.

Forum Veteran Joined: Nov 07, 2003 - 09:12 PM Posts: 901

Rexxxx wrote:

We no longer carry the nav pod. NVG's made them unnecessary.

sorry Rexxxx, the night vision goggles made the Navigation pod unnecessary? Shocked

I would have thought, standoff weapon made terrain following attack unneeded.

cheers,

Well, yes and no. There are a lot of varrying theories about that. We still train at low altitude both day and night, but now all the night training is done on NVG's, and looking around is a lot easier. Before you had the NAV pod which was essentially like looking through a soda straw that you could move a little to the left and right. Now with the NVG's you can still fly low altitude and it's still like looking through a soda straw, but at least you can see wherever you turn your head, giving you a much larger total field of view. It's my understanding that it's a lot less disorienting, too (I've never flown with the Nav pod).

As far as standoff weapons go, we don't really have that much of a standoff capability. With a couple of exceptions, we still have to get within a few miles of the target to deliver our weapons, and that still puts us in range of most of the surface-to-air threats that are out there. What really has driven the viper to a medium altitude delivery is the high AAA threat at lower altitudes. However, as SAM systems improve, we're finding that medium altitude is becoming less and less of the place where we want to be, also. That fact may either drive us back to low altitude, or to develop more standoff and higher altitude capabilities (which seems more likely to me).

Forum: F-16 Armament & Stores

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