A compact, high performance zoom lens for aircraft head-up displays

This customer required a compact, high performance lens to record high definition images for a head-up display in aircraft. The design challenge was that the system was to be used in several different aircraft, and consequently the distance to object was never the same. This meant that using a fixed focus lens was out of the question, and off-the-shelf zoom lenses were just too big.

We suggested a modified version of our miniature zoom lens. The core of the miniature zoom lens fitted into a special robust body that enabled the zoom and focus movements to be locked so that they did not move even when subjected to aircraft vibration. The new lens can be zoomed to a desired focal length, focused and locked up with only the iris motorised during flight. This approach saved many hours of development time thay would have been needed to design a new lens for this application.

This lens is currently used by several airforces around the world.

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