In the first half of a two-part feature, Douglas Barrie and Piotr Butowski review the short-range air-to-air missiles currently in service around the world.
Short-range air-to-air missiles
Seventy years ago, William McLean sketched out the design of a missile seeker based on infrared radiation. It marked the genesis of the most ‘successful’ air-to-air weapon ever designed, the Sidewinder: a missile with variant names that almost span the alphabet and that today remains in widespread service. By the turn of this century more than 200,000 of all versions had been produced.
Test-firings of the weapon began in 1953 and the AIM-9B model entered service with the US Navy in 1956. At that time the US Air Force was wedded to radar-guided systems intended to provide an all-weather capability and it was several years before it changed its position. The shift was promoted in part by the difficulty of developing the more complex semi-active radar-guided weapons, coupled with poor reliability and, all too often, disappointing performance.
Nearly half a century after the AIM-9B entered the US Navy inventory, the latest variant of the Sidewinder family, the AIM-9X, reached initial operational capability in 2003.
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