Raytheon AIM-9L Sidewinder - Pima ASM, Tucson, AZ - Static Aircraft Displays on Waymarking.com

The AIM-9 Sidewinder is a heat-seeking, short-range, air-to-air missile carried mostly by fighters and recently, certain gunship helicopters. The missile entered service with the US Navy in the mid-1950s, and variants and upgrades remain in active service with many air forces after five decades. The US Air Force (USAF) purchased the Sidewinder after the missile was developed by the Navy at NWS China Lake, CA.

The Sidewinder is the most widely used missile in the West, with more than 110,000 missiles produced for the US and 27 other nations, of which perhaps one percent have been used in combat. It has been built under license by some other nations including Sweden. The AIM-9 is one of the oldest, least expensive, and most successful air-to-air missiles, with an estimated 270 kills worldwide to date.

The missile was designed to be simple to upgrade. It has been said that the design goals for the original Sidewinder were to produce a reliable and effective missile with the "electronic complexity of a table model radio and the mechanical complexity of a washing machine"—goals which were well accomplished in the early missiles. The Navy hosted a 50th anniversary celebration of its existence in 2002. Boeing won a contract in March 2010 to support Sidewinder operations through 2055, guaranteeing that the weapons system will remain in operation until at least that date. USAF Spokeswoman Stephanie Powell noted that due to its relative low cost, versatility, and reliability it is "very possible that the Sidewinder will remain in USAF inventories through the late 21st century."

When a Sidewinder missile is being launched, most pilots including NATO pilots use the brevity code Fox Two in radio communication, as with all "heat-seeking" missiles.

Sidewinder is the common name of Crotalus cerastes, a venomous rattlesnake which uses infrared sensory organs to hunt warm-blooded prey. Early versions of the missile tended to perform zig-zagging course corrections during the early part of their flight path, following a trajectory that resembled the sidewinding motion of the snake.

The development of the Sidewinder missile began in 1946 at the Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS), Inyokern, CA, now the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, CA, as an in-house research project conceived by William B McLean. He initially called his effort "Local Fuze Project 602" using laboratory funding, volunteer help and fuze funding to develop what it called a heat-homing rocket. It did not receive official funding until 1951 when the effort was mature enough to show to Adm William "Deak" Parsons, Deputy Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance (BuOrd). It subsequently received designation as a program in 1952. The Sidewinder introduced several new technologies that made it simpler and much more reliable than its USAF counterpart, the AIM-4 Falcon, under development during the same period. After disappointing experiences with the Falcon in the Vietnam War, the USAF replaced its Falcons with Sidewinders.

The Sidewinder incorporated a number of innovations over the independently developed WW II German Missile Enzian's "Madrid" IR range fuze that enabled it to be successful. The first innovation was to replace the "steering" mirror with a forward-facing mirror rotating around a shaft pointed out the front of the missile. The detector was mounted in front of the mirror. When the long axis of the mirror, the missile axis and the line of sight to the target all fell in the same plane, the reflected rays from the target reached the detector (provided the target was not very far off axis). Therefore, the angle of the mirror at the instant of detection (w1) estimated the direction of the target in the roll axis of the missile.

The yaw/pitch (angle w2) direction of the target depended on how far to the outer edge of the mirror the target was. If the target was further off axis, the rays reaching the detector would be reflected from the outer edge of the mirror. If the target was closer on axis, the rays would be reflected from closer to the centre of the mirror. Rotating on a fixed shaft, the mirror's linear speed was higher at the outer edge. Therefore if a target was further off-axis its "flash" in the detector occurred for a briefer time, or longer if it was closer to the center. The off-axis angle could then be estimated by the duration of the reflected pulse of infrared.

The Sidewinder also included a dramatically improved guidance algorithm. The Enzian attempted to fly directly at its target, feeding the direction of the telescope into the control system as it if were a joystick. This meant the missile always flew directly at its target, and under most conditions would end up behind it, "chasing" it down. This meant that the missile had to have enough of a speed advantage over its target that it did not run out of fuel during the interception.

The Sidewinder is not guided on the actual position recorded by the detector, but on the change in position since the last sighting. So if the target remained at 5 degrees left between two rotations of the mirror, the electronics would not output any signal to the control system. Consider a missile fired at right angles to its target; if the missile is flying at the same speed as the target it should "lead" it by 45 degrees, flying to an impact point far in front of where the target was when it was fired. If the missile is traveling four times the speed of the target, it should follow an angle about 11 degrees in front. In either case, the missile should keep that angle all the way to interception, which means that the angle that the target makes against the detector is constant. It was this constant angle that the Sidewinder attempted to maintain. This "proportional pursuit" system is very easy to implement, yet it offers high-performance lead calculation almost for free and can respond to changes in the target's flight path, which is much more efficient and makes the missile "lead" the target.

However this system also requires the missile to have a fixed roll axis orientation. If the missile spins at all, the timing based on the speed of rotation of the mirror is no longer accurate. Correcting for this spin would normally require some sort of sensor to tell which way is "down" and then adding controls to correct it. Instead, small control surfaces were placed at the rear of the missile with spinning disks on their outer surface; these are known as rollerons. Airflow over the disk spins them to a high speed. If the missile starts to roll, the gyroscopic force of the disk drives the control surface into the airflow, cancelling the motion. Thus the Sidewinder team replaced a potentially complex control system with a simple mechanical solution.

Wally Schirra was an early Sidewinder test pilot when he was stationed at NOTS between 1952 to 1954. During one flight, Schirra fired the Sidewinder missile and the missile "doubled back" and started to chase his jet. Schirra, through skillful flying, avoided the Sidewinder. He later went onto to join NASA Mercury program as one of the first seven astronauts to fly into space.

A prototype Sidewinder, the XAAM-N-7/AIM-9A, was first fired successfully in September 1953. The initial production version, designated AAM-N-7/AIM-9B, entered operational use in 1956, and has been improved upon steadily since.

The first combat use of the Sidewinder was on 24 September 1958, with the air force of the Republic of China (Taiwan), during the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis. During that period of time, ROC F-86 Sabres were routinely engaged in air battles with the People's Republic of China over the Taiwan Strait. The PRC MiG-17s had higher altitude ceiling performance and in similar fashion to Korean War encounters between the F-86 and earlier MiG-15, the PRC formations cruised above the ROC Sabres, immune to their 50-cal guns and only choosing battle when conditions favored them. In a highly secret effort, the US provided a few dozen Sidewinders to ROC forces and a team to modify their Sabres. In the first encounter, the Sidewinders were used to ambush the MiG-17s as they flew past the Sabres thinking they were invulnerable to attack. The MiGs broke formation and descended to the altitude of the Sabres in swirling dogfights.

The Taiwan Strait battles inadvertently produced a new derivative: shortly after that conflict the Soviet Union began the manufacture of the K-13/R-3S missile (NATO reporting name AA-2 'Atoll'), a reverse-engineered copy of the Sidewinder. It was made possible after a Taiwanese AIM-9B hit a Chinese Communist MiG-17 without exploding, the missile lodging itself in the airframe of the MiG after which the pilot was able to bring both plane and missile back to base. According to Ron Westrum in his book "Sidewinder", the Soviets obtained the plans for Sidewinder from a Swedish Colonel, Stig Wennerström, and rushed their version into service by 1961 copying it so closely that even the part numbers were duplicated, although none of the known Soviet sources mention this. Years later, Soviet engineers would admit that the captured Sidewinder served as a "university course" in missile design and substantially improved Soviet air-to-air capabilities. The K-13 and its derivatives remained in production for nearly 30 years. In the 1960s, the possession of the K-13 in the Soviet arsenal caused major changes in the USAF bombing tactics, forcing bombers from high-altitudes down to lower levels, below enemy radar coverage. In 1972 when the Finnish Air Force started using the AIM-9P in their Saab 35 Draken fighters, they were already using Soviet-made Atoll in their MiG-21s; Finns found the two so similar that they tested Sidewinders in MiGs and Atolls in Drakens.

Although originally developed for the Navy and a competitor to the USAF AIM-4 Falcon, the Sidewinder was subsequently introduced into USAF service when DoD directed that the F-4 be adopted by the USAF. The USAF originally borrowed F-4Bs, which were equipped with AIM-9Bs as the short-range armament. The first production USAF Phantom was the F-4C, which carried the AIM-9B. The USAF opted to carry only AIM-4s on their F-4Ds introduced to Vietnam service in 1967, but disappointment with combat use of the Falcon led to a crash effort to reconfigure the F-4D so that it could carry Sidewinders. The USAF nomenclature for the Sidewinder was the GAR-8 (AIM-9E). During the 1960s the USN and USAF pursued their own separate versions of the Sidewinder, but cost considerations later forced the development of common variants beginning with the AIM-9L.

The Sidewinder subsequently evolved through a series of upgraded versions with newer, more sensitive seekers with various types of cooling and various propulsion, fuse, and warhead improvements. Although each of those versions had various seeker, cooling, and fusing differences, all but one shared infrared homing. The exception was the Navy AAM-N-7 Sidewinder IB (AIM-9C), a Sidewinder with a semi-active radar homing seeker head developed for the F-8 Crusader. Only about 1,000 of these weapons were produced, many of which were later rebuilt as the AGM-122 Sidearm anti-radiation missile.

Source: Wikipedia

Type of Aircraft: (make/model): Raytheon AIM-9L Sidewinder Tail Number: (S/N): s/n unknown Construction:: original aircraft Location (park, airport, museum, etc.): Located in hangar 1N at Pima Air & Space Museum, Tucson, AZ inside / outside: inside Other Information:: Pima Air & Space Museum 6000 E Valencia Rd Tucson, Arizona 85756 Phone 520-574-0462 Open 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM Daily Last admittance at 4:00 PM $15.50-Adults $12.50-Pima Co Residents $12.75-Seniors $ 9.00-Children FREE---Children 6 & under $ 7.00-AMARG $13.50-Group Rate Access restrictions: None

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