Airborne aiming pod is mainly used for searching, capturing and tracking the target indicated by the laser, and then dropping the laser-guided weapons precisely to complete the close-range support attack or dual-aircraft cooperative instruction/attack. High-precision laser beam pointing technology is the core of the airborne aiming pod, and the accuracy of it is fatal for the realization of the final tactical index. In this paper, the factors affecting the beam pointing accuracy based on the research of airborne aiming pod platform are analyzed. At first, the composition of the pod system and the motion coupling of the composite axis pod are introduced; and then the beam pointing algorithm under the external guidance combined with aircraft disturbance and the effects of atmospheric turbulence and atmospheric attenuation on beam quality, including optical axis drift, beam spread and intensity distribution variation are discussed. Finally, the performance of the pod servo system is simulated and verified in Simulink. The simulation result of the real flight situation with disturbance moment shows that the pointing accuracy of the airborne aiming pod can reach 0.0075 degrees. The data analyzed in this paper can provide technical reference for other aiming photoelectric platforms. © 2019 Elsevier GmbH