Where do I look?

[Flagrum]

All sensors have a feature where some sort of visual cue is displayed to show where the sensor is looking at.

 

 

If the TPOD is looking behind you, you see a small square dot at the bottom of the screen. Is the target abeam, the dot is shown left or right of the cross on the screen. And so on. The IRMAV has a similar dot and the TPOD displays an arrow at the velocity vector on the hud, pointing towards the designated target point.

 

 

This is supposed to aid the situational awarnes and to help to line up the aircraft - you know where your sensor is looking and you can turn accordingly.

 

 

But something is off - with all three variants, imo (I assume, all sensors share the same code here).

 

 

I often have the "feeling" that the cue is leading me wrong. Maybe it is that the cue is (too?) sensitive to the aircraft's bank angle? It behaves odd when banking - the cue is moving AWAY from the direction I intent to turn to until it hits 180° and then continues again the other way around - up to 0° when I am lined up. Banking alone makes the TPOD cue move around the cross a bit.

 

 

But that is not how it is supposed to be, right? The cue should only give a direction in a horizontal plane (parallel to the ground, NOT parallel to the aircraft wings), I would think?

[JLX]

I've found this "off" as well but haven't taken the time to document exactly what is going on. In addition to the TGP camera angle marker, I've also noticed that the TGP pipper on the HUD doesn't quite behave as I expect either when I fly past/over a designated target.

 

I get the feeling that perhaps the bank of the aircraft might be throwing off the calculations? i.e. seems to work when you're flying straight & level but when you bank to come around, you don't see what you expect while in the turn?

 

Once again, I haven't taken the time to properly analyse what is really going on yet so these thoughts are just a hunch. Not a very helpful post in that regard but I just wanted to add my general support at this point as I have also found myself going back to the HSI to realign for followup passes instead of using the TGP camera angle marker which seems off.

 

P.S. It'd be nice to get the North arrow on the TGP similar to what is displayed on the A-10.

[ouPhrontis]

This sounds like it's suffering from dip error, a condition with magnetic HIs. As to whether this system ought to be behaving like that, I doubt it.