Fog Of War: How Clever Technology Enables Military Pilots To See Through Smoke, Dust, Mist & Smog

Across time and cultures, the one great constant of warfare is confusion. Since the dawn of man, warriors on all sides have often lacked the situational awareness they needed to survive and succeed in battle.

In recent years, this metaphorical “fog of war” has begun to lift as new technologies became available to maintain communications and coordinate force movements even in the harshest circumstances.

However, fog isn’t just a metaphor for warfighters. It is a real problem on any battlefield where smoke, mist, clouds, dust, snow and other obscurants are present.

The Pentagon figures that 58% of the rotorcraft it lost during the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq were traceable to mishaps caused by what professionals call “degraded visual environments” or DVE.

The problem is particularly pronounced for helicopters, which often must fly close to the ground to protect themselves and surprise enemies.

If they are operating in forests, or mountainous terrain, or built-up areas with structures and hanging electrical wires, even a modest amount of visual degradation can lead to fatal mishaps.

That’s how most of the U.S. warfighters who have died in aircraft accidents in Afghanistan and Iraq met their end.

Beyond the vagaries of weather and enemy action, U.S. rotorcraft can cause serious loss of visual acuity by the simple act of taking off or landing in places where there is a lot of fine granular material like sand.

The situation is especially dangerous when multiple rotorcraft operate from the same landing zone, because the first pilot that takes off or lands can thoroughly obscure the visual cues that pilots who follow must have to operate safely.

When the obscurants thrown into the air are dust or sand, the condition is said to be a “brownout.” When the obscurant is snow, the condition is said to be a “whiteout.”

Either condition can lead to the loss of aircraft and personnel.

Several companies offer partial solutions to the challenge of degraded visual environments, such as cameras that can see through fog or rainfall.

Until relatively recently, though, no comprehensive solution was available that would allow military pilots to see through every type of obscurant in every imaginable condition, from a raging sandstorm to a blizzard.

Now a solution is at hand, thanks to a team of engineers at Sierra Nevada Corporation. SNC, as it prefers to call itself (to avoid confusion with the beer company) is an unusual enterprise.

It is run by a husband and wife team, the Ozmens, who emigrated separately to the U.S. from Turkey and then met while attending college in Nevada. Over the years SNC gradually grew into a global aerospace and defense firm, making the Ozmens billionaires. The company is still privately owned and headquartered in Nevada.

SNC contributes to my think tank and is a consulting client, as are several other players in the DVE space. What makes the SNC offering different and has contributed to a series of contract wins from the Pentagon is a modular design philosophy that militates against the idea there is a one-size-fits-all solution to DVE regardless of mission.

Instead, the company has assembled an ensemble of deep-penetrating sensors from across the electromagnetic spectrum that collectively can see through every type of obscurant but typically must be tailored to the specific role that a rotorcraft is expected to play.

For instance, if a helicopter is expected to operate in the smog and dust presented by the Persian Gulf region, then a certain configuration of sensors is dictated. If, on the other hand, the main challenge is smoke as in the case of Forest Service personnel fighting wildfires, then a simpler configuration is sufficient.

It all depends on the mission requirements, and the modular design of the Sierra Nevada solution enables sensors like infrared cameras, millimeter-wave radars, laser rangefinders and so on to be added or subtracted as needed.

Whatever the requirements, the system is designed to fuse all sensor readings into an integrated picture that is presented to pilots using intuitive symbology. That symbology might be superimposed on a head-up display, a cockpit screen, or a helmet-mounted device.

The Air Force was sufficiently impressed by the SNC solution that a contract was awarded last year to equip the service’s combat search-and-rescue helicopters, which may be called upon to retrieve downed pilots from behind enemy lines in unpredictable visual conditions.

The company previously won a contract from the U.S. Special Operations Command to equip rotorcraft operating under unusually dangerous circumstances.

According to a published report, the cost of the SNC equipment might be as little as $100,000, or as much as a million dollars—it all depends on what the mission of the aircraft is. The price-tag for a combat helicopter’s protection might be towards the high end of the range because of its operating regime close to the ground, whereas the price-tag to equip a fixed-wing aircraft that must deal mainly with poor weather conditions might be lower.

It all depends on the mission, and the operating requirements dictated by that mission.

The bottom line is that a pilot will be able to see any objects that might impair his or her ability to operate safely, whether they be cables obscured by fog or other aircraft surrounded by a dust cloud or even friendly troops transiting the landing zone.

SNC says its technology can be readily adapted to any type of aircraft including commercial cargo planes and the type of civilian helicopter in which Kobe Bryant died (apparently due to the pilot’s disorientation in fog).

There are other options available in the marketplace, but the military seems to have concluded SNC offers the most comprehensive solution.