LANTIRN

LANTIRN significantly increases the combat effectiveness of these aircraft, allowing them to fly at low altitudes, at night and under-the-weather to attack ground targets with a variety of precision-guided weapons.

The navigation pod contains a terrain-following radar and a fixed thermographic camera, which provides a visual cue and input to the aircraft's flight control system, enabling it to maintain a pre-selected altitude above the terrain and avoid obstacles.

The navigation pod enables the pilot to fly along the general contour of the terrain at high speed, using mountains, valleys and the cover of darkness to avoid detection.

LANTIRN represented a major advance in the U.S. military's ability to carry out operations in darkness and adverse weather, and has been developed further into its successor, the AN/AAQ-33 Sniper pod.

Early flight clearance work to clear the aircraft for air-to-ground were suspended due to development delays with the F-14 and it being shifted away from the air to ground mission.

At the time, the Tomcat was so expensive (and lacked proper defensive electronic countermeasures (DECM) and radar homing and warning (RHAW) for overland operations) that the Navy did not want to risk it in the air-to-ground role.

With the end of the Cold War and de-emphasis on the Fleet Air Defense mission, NAVAIR had renewed flight clearance work before Desert Storm so the F-14 could carry gravity bombs as well as laser-guided bombs if the target was lased by another jet (first Tomcat LGB drop in combat was made by VF-41 in 1995 during operations over Bosnia with an A-6 Intruder providing the requisite target illumination).

The LTS featured a Global Positioning System and inertial measurement unit that provided the pod line-of-sight cueing and weapon release ballistics and eliminated the need for external cumbersome and time-consuming boresight equipment.