Lockheed Martin is developing an upgrade to the company’s Sniper targeting pod that will allow greater co-ordination between fifth-generation combat aircraft and other battlefield assets.
Known as thee Hybrid Base Station (HBS), the upgrade will allow existing Sniper pods installed on fourth-generation aircraft like the Lockheed Martin F-16 fighter to receive targeting data straight from Lockheed’s fifth-generation F-35 family of jets.
That target information could then also be passed to ground-based fires, such as Lockheed’s High Mobility Artillery Rocket System.
This has notably previously been restricted due to information security concerns about the data being collected by the F-35’s classified suite of onboard sensors.
“That hasn’t been approved before,” says Stacy Kubicek, head of Lockheed’s sensors and global sustainment unit.
Technical compatibility issues and concerns about electromagnetic emissions giving away the stealth fighter’s position over hostile territory have also been a factor.
“If you think about an F-35 normally, it’s kind of operating in the front by itself and not communicating with a lot of the fourth-gen [platforms],” Kubicek told FlightGlobal during an interview at the Paris air show.
The HBS is meant to address this issue, enabling secure transmission of F-35 sensor data to other aircraft equipped with a Sniper pod.
“A targeting pod is now becoming a communication node,” says Kubicek.
Also produced by Lockheed, the Sniper pod uses electro-optical and infrared imaging to detect, automatically track, and laser designate targets for lethal munitions. The fuselage-mounted pod is deployed with 27 countries aboard more than a dozen strike aircraft types.
These include the Boeing F-15C, F-15E, full F/A-18 family, B-1B supersonic bomber, B-52 heavy bomber, Fairchild Republic A-10 attack jet, and all models of the F-16. Foreign-made aircraft also operate the Sniper, including the Eurofighter Typhoon, Dassault Aviation Rafale and Mirage fighters, the Korea Aerospace Industries FA-50, and Japan’s Mitsubishi F-2.
That list could expand to include the next-generation autonomous jets currently being developed to support conventional combat aircraft – if those uncrewed platforms are designed with data compatibility in mind.
“As long as they have the ability to process that data, then they’re going to have access to that data,” Kubicek says.
Lockheed plans to demonstrate the Sniper pod HBS later this year, with the possibility of putting the upgrade into production sometime in the next few years.
That demonstration event will see a fifth-generation aircraft transmit data to a fourth-generation counterpart, which will then relay that targeting information to a ground station able to cue other strike assets or further pass along the information.
