Stabilised surveillance payloads

Extract

It has long been recognised that in moving vehicles, if an observer wishes to study a distant object with any accuracy, the sightline along which he is looking must be stabilised against the vehicle motion. There are various ways by which a sightline may be stabilised, and for several years now the Aircraft Equipment Department of Ferranti Instrumentation Limited have been producing stabilised sighting systems for helicopters and tanks using a directly coupled gyro/mirror technique. At present we are developing systems for use in RPVs, one of which will be flown for evaluation in a fixed wing RPV research vehicle, the other under a tethered parachute.