Photo By Clifford Davis | JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (Feb. 27, 2019) An MX-20 electro-optical infrared turret is...... read more read more
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – With the cut of a ribbon, Fleet Readiness Center Southeast officially declared maintenance capability on the MX-20 electro-optical, infrared turret Wednesday.
The repair work on the “eyes” of the P-8A Poseidon aircraft will begin with about five units per year, and will be conducted at the Navy depot’s avionics facility on board Naval Air Station Jacksonville.
“This is a center of excellence for avionics,” said FRCSE Business Management Specialist Steven Schedlbauer. “We repair turrets for every branch of the military, so when the Department of Defense looked at who the depot source of repair was going to be, we were the natural choice.”
A main tenant of NAS Jacksonville, VP, or patrol squadrons, fly the Poseidon on missions to patrol and conduct intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance. One of the most important tools in their trade is the MX-20.
“They use it for surveillance, mostly on the surface, but also for airborne targets as well,” said L3 WESCAM Director of Sales for Navy Programs Mark Kikta. “It can track targets, it can report locations, coordinates and speed automatically.”
Obviously, having the ability see and engage at long distance is critical to surveillance and patrol missions.
“Surveillance cameras on airplanes have become so important that, on a lot of missions, it’s not even worth taking off if your camera doesn’t work,” Kikta said. “So when they break, we can’t afford to have them sitting around broken.
“They need to be fixed, and they need to be fixed in a reasonable amount of time.”
That’s where FRCSE comes in.
“It was just a matter of getting our artisans trained on the specifics of this particular product,” Schedlbauer said. “They are extremely skilled on these turrets, which is one of the reasons we were chosen as the depot source of repair for the MX-20.”
| Date Taken: | 02.27.2019 |
| Date Posted: | 02.28.2019 13:53 |
| Story ID: | 312289 |
| Location: | JACKSONVILLE, FL, US |
| Web Views: | 445 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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