Airborne pointing and pointing improvement strategy for SOFIA

Pointing is one of the most peculiar tasks in an airborne telescope. During design and realization on ground only half of the story can be solved. Final commissioning, tuning and testing can only be executed with the real telescope in the real aircraft during flight. The paper describes the commissioning and testing strategy for the pointing control on ground and in flight, and reports what has been done up to now at the pre-assembled telescope on ground, what is planned for the implementation 'in flight', and what strategy for further improvement is applied.