Postwar British missile procurement

[Bruno Anthony]

Scrap all British AAMs in favour of licensing Sidewinder and Sparrow. Invest saved money in seeker research, and then build Skyflash and SRAAM-100 in the 1970s, leading to Active Skyflash in the 1980s.

UK has a weird inability to produce indigenous AAMs like the US has a weird inability to produce tank guns. Odd.

 

[Bruno Anthony]

Red Top is a fine weapon but expensive. Its basically an attempt at near AIM-9L performance with 1950s technology. It was never fired in anger to my knowledge, so we don't know how well it would have worked in practice. I suspect its complexity would have somewhat outweighed its bigger warhead and better seeker. Probably fine on bombers (its intended target) but poor against fighters.

I'd like to see some evidence of any SARH weapon that proved more than marginally useful in combat prior to the late 70s / early 80s (R-27 / Sky Flash / AIM-7M). Possibly AIM-54, though it has a terminal active phase.

Important to remember that AFAIK all initial AAM programs were designed to shoot down high flying Mach 0.9 (Eagle had juice for supersonic bombers) bombers. Can’t really fault their failures against maneuvering fighters.

 

[pathology_doc]

Red Top is a fine weapon but expensive. Its basically an attempt at near AIM-9L performance with 1950s technology. It was never fired in anger to my knowledge, so we don't know how well it would have worked in practice. I suspect its complexity would have somewhat outweighed its bigger warhead and better seeker. Probably fine on bombers (its intended target) but poor against fighters.

I'd like to see some evidence of any SARH weapon that proved more than marginally useful in combat prior to the late 70s / early 80s (R-27 / Sky Flash / AIM-7M). Possibly AIM-54, though it has a terminal active phase.

Important to remember that AFAIK all initial AAM programs were designed to shoot down high flying Mach 0.9 (Eagle had juice for supersonic bombers) bombers. Can’t really fault their failures against maneuvering fighters.

Falcon arose out of a project for a defensive missile to be used by bombers against attacking fighters. However, given that the airplanes it ended up being deployed on in US service were almost exclusively purpose-built interceptors, it's clear that this original intention had a very short lifespan.

 

[Siberia]

People have discussed guidance and to a lesser extent physical design, but has anyone mentioned propulsion? Solid fuels especially seem pretty important for the various types of missiles.

 

[Hood]

I have just come across an interesting snippet from a letter from the French Minister of Defence Michel Debré dated September 1971 following some Anglo-French collaboration talks (Jaguar et al).
In the letter he confirms a proposal to collaborate with UK industry in the development and production phases of the Matra Super 530 and for the production phase of the Matra 550 Magic.

Given his comment that he hopes that if the UK does not seek a national solution to "the programmes in question" that it would favour an Anglo-French collaboration I would conclude that the Super 530 must have been in the running along with Sparrow for ASR.1219 (Project XJ.521) that was issued in Feb 1972 and which resulted in the selection of Skyflash.

Given that Super 530 and Skyflash both entered development and production at the same time it looks possible that at some stage there was a possibility of an Anglo-French Super 530, perhaps a Marconi seeker on the French missile?

 

[timmymagic]

UK has a weird inability to produce indigenous AAMs like the US has a weird inability to produce tank guns. Odd.

And yet we ended up today with Asraam and Meteor....something changed...

Given that Super 530 and Skyflash both entered development and production at the same time it looks possible that at some stage there was a possibility of an Anglo-French Super 530, perhaps a Marconi seeker on the French missile?

What would we have hung it on though? We were really keen on semi conformal carriage through Phanton, Tornado ADV and then Typhoon.

 

[Scott Kenny]

IMO, the serious failing was not pushing Taildog/SRAAM development. A missile that will only indicate a lockon when the target is within the no-escape zone. Carrying 4-8 of those would have easily replaced any guns on an aircraft.

 

[Hood]

What would we have hung it on though? We were really keen on semi conformal carriage through Phanton, Tornado ADV and then Typhoon.

Good question. Which is probably why the Sparrow was always going to be a shoe-in given it had to fit on Phantom.
Given ADV at this point was still a drawing board doodle, its possible it may have been reconfigured for conformal fitting. The Super 530 was a chunky beast for sure - but then its no weirder than hanging Sea Darts off a Vulcan!

Reading between the lines of the letter Debré could probably sense a UK-US weapon was the likely result and he wanted to avoid that if possible.

 

[Pirate Pete]

IMO, the serious failing was not pushing Taildog/SRAAM development. A missile that will only indicate a lockon when the target is within the no-escape zone. Carrying 4-8 of those would have easily replaced any guns on an aircraft.

I seem to recall that the U.S. in particular discovered that guns were not ‘outdated’ during the Vietnam conflict.
Missiles are all well and good, but it was found that in an ‘old fashioned’ dogfight, guns are very useful.

 

[Zoo Tycoon]

For short range IR, the problem was the Sidewinder was just so good. It’s basic objective and philosophy of providing a degree of guidance to a cheap 3inch was delivered with clever, elegant, indeed brilliant design which amounted to miniaturisation before the phrase had even been invented. Cheap equals quantity which has a quality all of its own. Sure Firestreak and Red Top offered respectable performance but they’re just uncompetitive in the wider market. Then in the nineties electronic miniaturisation offered more performance and was available to everyone the Sidewinder has gradually lost its exclusivity.

As for radar, the Brits initially went for fire and forget Red Dean but the it’s range was not too different to Sidewinder, ok front aspect, but it was really heavy, expensive and draggy. So semi-active was the way forwards which are inherently launch platform dependent. The only two U.K. produced fighters capable of supporting a capable radar, ie the Sea Vixen and Javelin didn’t make it to the next variant and worthy replacements, ie F155 and P1121, were strangled at birth. It’s not that surprising that nothing really emerged until the tarted up Sparrow aka Skyflash for Tonka F3.

 

[Scott Kenny]

I seem to recall that the U.S. in particular discovered that guns were not ‘outdated’ during the Vietnam conflict.
Missiles are all well and good, but it was found that in an ‘old fashioned’ dogfight, guns are very useful.

The problem in Vietnam was that rear-aspect sidewinders would indicate a lock when the target aircraft was not within the missile's kinematic engagement capabilities.

Taildog was supposed to be able to engage a target anywhere the seeker could lock onto it.

What the US did was teach the pilots to fly the missile, instead of making a missile that worked the way the pilots wanted it to.

 

[Siberia]

It’s not that surprising that nothing really emerged until the tarted up Sparrow aka Skyflash for Tonka F3.

Tarted up? It was a little more than that as I understand things.

 

[JEngO-23]

From a Strike Command report commissioned in 1979 to investigate why Red Top performance was so poor during missile practice camp firings. As noted, the missile was meeting its design criteria - it just hadn't been designed for the low altitude profiles the RAF was flying in the 1970s (stats were based on 12 years of firings).

Sounds like a very interesting and authoritative report, which I would like to track down if possible. It would be a great help if you could add any further details such as the title, reference and issue date of the report. Also, do you have any suggestions on particular archives or other organisations that might have a copy of this report.

 

[JEngO-23]

As a relatively new member of this forum, I am catching up on posts about Firestreak and Red Top in several different threads. My first interaction with these missiles was in August 1973 as the JEngO on 23 Squadron. We were allocated 5 Firestreak missiles to fire at the Squadron’s annual MPC that year, and 5 Red Tops at our MPC the following year. In the absence of firings in real combat, these MPC firings were the closest we got to evaluating the missiles in realistic conditions, recognising the absence of the additional stress on the pilot in live combat. In retirement after 50 years in the RAF and aerospace industry, I am now trying to pull together a detailed story about the development and in-service use of the missiles. I have been working on this for several years and expect to take a few more before I complete it. I have copies of most of the relevant reports mentioned in this forum, but the type of Strike Command report referred to by yellowaster in his post on 1 Sep 2019 has not shown up in my extensive searches to date. Any help in tracking it down would be greatly appreciated.

 

[JEngO-23]

The ICON magazine article is a goldmine. As for the three references, I have the third in my possession. The Benecke and Quick book in the references is one I believe I may have once held in my hands at a secondhand bookstore and neglected to buy. This makes me a very stupid person.

The extensive AGARD report on "History of German Guided Missiles Development", edited by Benecke and Quick, is available online at
https://archive.org/details/AGARD20/AGARD-AG-20/mode/2up

 

[JEngO-23]

There's a interesting article by Colin Hempstead from ICON magazine available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/23787168 on Firestreak and Red Top.

From the citations:

M. Hollingsworth and G.C. Owen, Fireflash to Skyflash (RAF Benevolent Fund Enterprises, London, 2004)

In his Post # 16 on this thread, way back on 1 Sept 2019, overscan (PaulMM) mentioned the excellent book "Fireflash to Skyflash" by Hollingsworth and Owen. Online prices for this book can be quite high, but for anyone looking for a copy, the shop in the Jet Age Museum (JAM) at Gloucester had several new copies for sale at a substantially reduced price; I think it was around £10 when I bought mine during a visit to the museum last year. I was told that the books were donated to the museum by one of the authors.
Unfortunately the version of this book at the JAM does not include the CD of photographs that was inside the back-cover of the original. The copy held by the National Aerospace Library (NAL) at Farnborough has the CD, but it appears to be corrupted and the NAL have been unable to download its contents. Does anybody have an uncorrupted version of the CD from the book?

 

[pathology_doc]

In his Post # 16 on this thread, way back on 1 Sept 2019, overscan (PaulMM) mentioned the excellent book "Fireflash to Skyflash" by Hollingsworth and Owen. Online prices for this book can be quite high, but for anyone looking for a copy, the shop in the Jet Age Museum (JAM) at Gloucester had several new copies for sale at a substantially reduced price; I think it was around £10 when I bought mine during a visit to the museum last year. I was told that the books were donated to the museum by one of the authors.
Unfortunately the version of this book at the JAM does not include the CD of photographs that was inside the back-cover of the original. The copy held by the National Aerospace Library (NAL) at Farnborough has the CD, but it appears to be corrupted and the NAL have been unable to download its contents. Does anybody have an uncorrupted version of the CD from the book?

I have the book, and assuming I get my laptop back from service tonight, I can see if the CD is in it and if it works.