Infrared Portrait

While going through some stuff we brought from the old house, I ran across an old Polaroid photo of myself as seen through a Forward Looking Infrared Receiver (FLIR). The FLIR was part of the optical suite of instruments destined to be the night vision system on the Abrams M1 Army Tank. At that time, I was a Member of the Technical Staff at Hughes Aircraft Company in charge of the design of display symbology for the system.

The imaging quality of the FLIR is not as bad as the photo makes it look. Bear in mind that the photo is over forty years old and is one of those old Polaroids that required a coating of “fixer” to keep the image from fading. The coating made the image look blotchy.

That is my infrared signature as I posed, arms folded, in front of the FLIR for the photo. The image is “white hot” which means that the warmer temperatures are brighter. You can see the lenses on my glasses are a little darker than my face because they are somewhat opaque to FLIR detectors. The three horizontal lines are due to three dead channels in the IR detector array. The targeting reticule (my design) in the lower right is one of several symbols displayed in the image and is computer controlled to position itself at a point in the image where a fired round from the big gun would hit.

The Abrams tank saw action in Operation Desert Storm. The targeting FLIR easily found and knocked out several of Saddam Hussein’s Russian tanks of the so-called “Republican Guard” long before they saw our forces approaching in Kuwait. I take pride to know that between the Abrams and Hellfire Missiles, both systems of which I had designed in part, some of the Iraqis were forced to retreat back across the border and out of Kuwait.