[vimeo id=”162088181″]

Don’t you wish that all tech demos were this exciting? What you’re looking at, above, isn’t just gorgeous footage of a SAAB Gripen jet fighter playing around in the clouds, what you’re looking at is a proof-of-concept stabilisation setup created for SAAB by a company called Gyro-Stabilized Systems.

What they do is in their name but the challenge they were issued was to create a unit capable of remaining stable at a speed of 300 knots (around 555km/h), a challenge that GSS took up. The resulting GSS 520 5 axis system is capable of… well, just look at it.

The footage of the Gripen in action was shot from the weapon station of a SAAB 105 training craft, which had the GSS 520 fitted, on a Red Dragon 6K camera (the pieces of which start at R350,000) packing a 30-300mm Canon lens. Footage was transmitted into the cockpit wirelessly. Blue Sky, the company that commissioned the Gyro, said that the lens was picked because of its length. Regardless, the results speak for themselves, being so smooth that they look almost strange. We’ve come to expect at least some jitter from our aerial photography. This looks like a video game.

Source: Blue Sky (Vimeo)