Soldiers with 3rd Battalion, 27th Field Artillery, drove their High Mobility Artillery Rocket System out the rear of an Air Force C-17 Globemaster III at Pope Air Force Base, N.C., Oct. 22, with a new advancement that will get them into the fight faster.
The ‘Hot Panel’ program allows the HIMARS to link into an aircraft’s GPS and track itself in the air, anywhere in the world. The advancement will allow Soldiers to switch between a land mode and an air mode so the vehicle tracking system can find its location and its targets rapidly when it exits an airplane.
Engineers from Lockheed Martin and Redstone Arsenal, Ala., who are working together on the project, came to Fort Bragg and Pope Air Force Base to gather data through flight tests using the HIMARS vehicles and a C-17.
The flight plan included take off, ground fire avoidance measures, approach and landing. They engineers working on the project also implemented a program that will sense movement and switch the navigational unit between air mode and land mode.
The flights were used to verify the data from previous flights and to confirm the changes already implemented were working correctly.
According to James Cyr, precision fires project office at Redstone Arsenal, Ala., the data collected from this round of test flights will be computed and used to develop the final version of the software due out in 2011.
The plan is to make the system as simple as possible for Soldiers to allow them to get into the fight quicker.