Gun pod - Definition and Overview

A gun pod is a detachable external pod or pack allowing one or more machine guns or automatic cannon to be carried by a military aircraft. Modern gun pods are usually fitted with suspension lugs to be carried on standard aircraft pylons.

Pods for electric Gatling guns customarily also contain an electric motor and battery to drive the weapon. Some older pods, such as the USAF SUU-16/A, used a ram-air turbine to drive the weapon's mechanism, but those systems imposed unacceptable drag penalties for the carrier aircraft.

The advantages of gun pods:

• They allow guns to be fitted when needed, without occupying internal volume.
• They isolate gun recoil and vibration effects from fragile avionics like radar
• By mounting the weapon under the wings or fuselage, they (generally) avoid the problems of gun gas being ingested by jet engines (a substantial hazard for early turbojet-powered fighters) and of the pilot being blinded by muzzle flash.

Their disadvantages:

• They impose a substantial drag penalty on the carrier aircraft.
• They are inherently less accurate than an integral gun because the pylon mounting is inevitably less rigid. Powerful cannon, like the GPU-5 30mm gun pod, exacerbate the problem, as their heavy recoil leads to pylon misalignment.

Since the Vietnam War, the USAF has moved away from the use of gun pods, feeling that the use of multi-million dollar aircraft for strafing is an economically foolish proposition. The Soviet Union and Russia remain proponents of strafing, and have continued to develop new systems specifically for that purpose. Soviet experience in Afghanistan in the 1980s led to an unusual innovation in the form of the SPPU series of gun pods, which have traversable barrels allowing them to continue to fire on a fixed target as the aircraft passes overhead.