Anybody able to ID the new pod carried by a British Typhoon at RAF Coningsby?

June 9, 2012 Military Aviation

David Cenciotti

Update Jun. 10, 2012 15.30 GMT

The following image was taken by The Aviationist’s contributor Alessandro Fucito at RAF Coningsby on May 28. It shows a local Eurofighter Typhoon FGR4 ZJ935 [DJ] belonging to the 11 Sqn landing at the end of a training sortie.

Noteworthy, not only the aircraft wears several Paveway LGB (Laser Guided Bomb) mission marks gained during the air campaign in Libya, but it carries a new kind of pod on a right wing’s pylon.

Considered its position and shape it most probably is a sort-of Airborne Instrumentation Subsystem (AIS) pod used for ACMI (Air Combat Maneuvering Instrumentation) activities, but I’d like to know whether any of The Aviationist’s reader is able to provide more details about this new (at least to me) pod.

Update: the pod has been positively identified thanks to the contribution of several readers as a RAIDS (Rangeless Airborne Instrumentation Debriefing System) used by the RAF since several years and first spotted on the Typhoon fleet in Oct. 2011.

Image credit: Alessandro Fucito

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About David Cenciotti

David Cenciotti is a journalist based in Rome, Italy. He is the Founder and Editor of “The Aviationist”, one of the world’s most famous and read military aviation blogs. Since 1996, he has written for major worldwide magazines, including Air Forces Monthly, Combat Aircraft, and many others, covering aviation, defense, war, industry, intelligence, crime and cyberwar. He has reported from the U.S., Europe, Australia and Syria, and flown several combat planes with different air forces. He is a former 2nd Lt. of the Italian Air Force, a private pilot and a graduate in Computer Engineering. He has written five books and contributed to many more ones.

Tom Hill says:

June 12, 2012 at 10:51 AM

If you look on Airliners website you will see RAIDS pods on RAF Coningsby Typhoons during 2007.
Rob says:

July 7, 2012 at 5:35 PM

It is indeed a MBDA RAIDS pod, the same type carried by Tornado and others. The Typhoon variant appears different as it has weights fitted to simulate the mass of an AIM-9L Sidewinder for store/flight control software integration purposes.
Bobby says:

July 1, 2014 at 6:49 PM

It’s a Heavy weight RAIDS pod, the weights simulate an ASRAAM rather than a AIM9L as when it used on a Block 2 and 2A (Being Analogue) it is dialled in to the stores page as an ASRAAM so that both an ASRAAM and RAIDS can be carried together.
On a Block 5 and up, the aircraft is digital and the RAIDS is dialled in as a AIM9L, if it was dialled into the stores page as an ASRAAM, the ACS would look for a digital connection to the RAIDS which it doesn’t have. Hence why a Block 5 (Like the one shown) can only carry a RAIDS or ASRAAM and not both, you can’t mix Analogue and Digital Stores on a Typhoon (Well you can but the system isn’t designed to allow it).