LAU-138

The LAU-138 chaff dispenser was developed to meet the need for additional chaff cartridge payload capacity. The launcher itself was developed in Sweden by CelsiusTech as a chaff dispenser integrated into a rail designed to replace the LAU-7 Sidewinder rail. Each rail holds up to 160 chaff packages, each being smaller than a normal chaff cartridge while still enabling the mounting of a single AIM-9 Sidewinder to itself.

On the F-14 the LAU-138 was used mounted on the 1A and 8A stations. While technically able to be mounted on the respective B stations as well, it wasn’t possible to refill the launcher while mounted there so wasn’t used there operationally.

While having the LAU-138s mounted, the R10 and R20 sections in the launcher are both connected to the R20 section and the R10 connected to the LAU-138s. This means that the R20 section type setting on the programmer controls both R10 and R20 and the R10 section type setting should always be set to C for chaff.

Each launcher holds, as mentioned, 160 chaff packages and each ejection impulse ejects four packages from each launcher, each package being about 1/4 the size of a normal chaff cartridge. This results in that each ejection impulse ejects the equivalent of two chaff cartridges in total and that a total of 40 ejections are available from the launchers.

As the launchers use the R10 section of the programmer, mounting two LAU-138s results means that the counter for chaff on the controller should be increased by 40. A chaff only loadout can result in the number of launches available to be in total 100, which is too much for the counter, and that the counter will effectively show one chaff ejection less than what’s really available. The last ejection will still work though.

In summary, this means that when using the LAU-138 an additional 40 chaff ejections are available increasing the total number to anywhere from 100 chaff to 40 chaff and 60 flares when combined with the normal AN/ALE-39 loadout and that the R10 section should always be set to C for chaff when mounted.