Sky,
Actually, I had the horizon line set up perfectly in the straightforward position before I left the house. The SAVS pod is designed at a 45-off-a-45 degree angle, so that facing straight forward, the camera will be level inside the pod. In that video the camera is set downward 45 degrees just before the flight. We frequently have to change the camera angle several times during a practice mission - depending on what we want to look at. If the camera is facing 30 degrees downward, it's great when you're looking at the near side of a building, for instance, but if you want to look at the other side, you have to fly WAY over behind it, and turn around to look back. The alternative is to lower your altitude, but you can't do that because the building blocks your view. So what you have to do is aim the camera more downward, say 75 degrees.

Or let's say there's a tanker spill. On the same mission you want to fly over the scene and look down to see how much chemical has been spilled. Then you want to reset the camera level to fly down low to see if there's leakage underneath, and to read the truck's declaration plaque. You don't have the time or the setup to recalibrate the level every time you change the camera angle.

Now take that to the extreme case and say you need to aim the camera straight down, which is sometimes required. Think about this: the geometry of the mount and pod would then dictate that you'd have to rotate the camera & foam 90 degrees inside the pod. Additionally, you would not be looking forward, but at a 45 degree angle off to the right! Actually, you CANNOT aim the camera straight down! So as you can see, there are some serious shortcomings to this design. You cannot tilt the camera off the horizontal without it affecting the horizon setting. If you always have it set at 30 degrees or something, then there's no problem. Also I don't think the camera, foam and internal wires could stand up to continuous twisting around inside the pod every time we change the camera angle. We might need to re-mount the camera hardware in a simple swivel like Bergen uses.

Since we're pushing the envelope, I guess we get to lick a lot of stamps!

- Bruce

PS. Here's the ideal setup: the landing gear is raised to allow free 360 degree cameral gimbal action. We can only dream!