In defense of the American missiles, they were being used way, WAY outside their design envelopes in Vietnam.
This is true, and I admit I'm actually a frequent defender of all three. But even when firing conditions were met, there were numerous examples of failure to fire, failure to guide and other unreliability issues which made people swear at their own weapons and made Phantom pilots grateful they had so many of them.
Active Skyflash needed to be developed in the 1980s
According to BSP4, open beside me, it came down to the weight of a four-missile load-out... and the fact that AMRAAM is a lot easier for Harriers to carry also probably helped to seal that deal. Follow-up Skyflash design evolution led eventually to the Meteor AAM, so it wasn't wasted.
I still don't understand how the British didn't build a missile and then expect more or less all planes to be able to carry it, as opposed to what they did with designing the missile and an aircraft to carry it together. So that when either missile or aircraft ran into trouble, the whole project gets canceled.
Funny you should say that. I've just started re-reading through BSP1 (revised edition), specifically the first chapter on the RN's search for a night fighter, and the number of projects that were expected to carry either Fireflash, Red Dean or both (and which were detailed in manufacturer brochures with options for either or both) is quite substantial, necessitating a change in the wing folding point on one design so that the bigger missile could be loaded up with the wings folded (and room for fuselage clearance). It seems it was even specified for the Sea Vixen at one point.
I'll have to go digging around on my bookshelf for John Forbat's
Secret World of Vickers Guided Weapons and refresh my memory on what he says on the matter, seeing as he was intimately associated with the project. One of the reasons BSP4 gives for cancellation is that it was designed for subsonic aircraft and wasn't suitable for carriage and launch at high Mach numbers (p38). The irony is that those subsonic aircraft would remain in service into the early 1970s in one case (Sea Vixen), and really could have used a radar-homing weapon, even one subsequently degraded to SARH and especially once the size and weight had been reduced. As so often happened, the best (or the intended best) was the enemy of what might in the long run have been good enough (had it gone to firing trials and had the bugs ironed out).
Meanwhile, Firestreak was a multi-platform missile (Lightning, Javelin, Sea Vixen) and so too was Red Top (Lightning, Sea Vixen FAW.2), and both were expected to go on all sorts of aircraft - including P.1154, which was briefly ordered before being cancelled - if only they had actually been built.
That being said, there
are certainly enough big missile projects which WERE designed with a particular aircraft in mind (BSP4, pp 42-44) and which died with their mounts.
What I observe in this section is dwelling on specifically British projects and returning over and over again to the same basic topics.
Some of the discussions here are interesting and fruitful, but there comes a point where a topic is done to death.
How about Soviet Projects? US Projects?
Perusal of the American and Soviet Secret Projects volumes gives the impression of a greater number of projects carried through to built-in-steel aircraft that flew with varying degrees of success, and far fewer that were aborted between the start of prototype construction and first flight, or first flight and production status (and of the latter, even some of those were shown in the harsh light of day to be flawed, or simply inferior to the aircraft they flew off against). This is why the desire for a rewrite of history isn't as strong as for the British projects. The unique British position taken in 1957, something neither the Americans nor the Soviets nor the French even considered, is also a turning point that many rightly feel was badly mishandled.
