With a newly developed optical data link, Cassidian enables the real-time transmission of large amounts of data, such as reconnaissance videos, from a fast flying jet to the ground.

Thanks to a one hundred times increase in transmission speed compared to conventional systems, in military or in civil operations, e.g. in disaster zones, more detailed situational information can be used more quickly and comprehensively than ever before.

Test flights were carried out at the end of November near Cassidian’s Military Air Systems Center at Manching, Germany.

For the first time it was possible to successfully operate a high-precision laser data link tracking system between a Tornado combat aircraft flying close to the speed of sound and a ground station over a range in excess of 60 kilometres. The data rate achieved during a fly-by of less than a minute was about 1 gigabit per second. This corresponds to about one hundred times the usual data rate thus far, for air-to-ground transmissions.

Until now, data links used classical radio signals which, owing to their low bandwidth, can only transmit high-resolution images or raw data from airborne reconnaissance sensors to a very limited extent in real time. For the first time, this new laser data link technology makes it possible to exploit the ever increasing performance of sensors.

There will be a particular need for this in future, for unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with special radar reconnaissance systems and high-resolution cameras, which have to continuously send large amounts of data to a ground station.