Sidewinder - The Weapon That Changed Air Combat

When your missile only needs a flashlight and a meter stick to do a function check, I'd say it's pretty damn simple, and along with being intended to be in service for likely 100+ years, pretty damn reliable.

The Sidewinder is a 'grandpa's axe' type weapon. in that almost everything on it has been upgraded or altered since the beginning. 'It's had 5 new handles and 2 new heads, but it's still Grandpa's axe.'

When I was in the Army in the sixties, we had the Sergeant Missile System. The crews referred to it as the “Civil Servant” missile. It wouldn’t work and you couldn’t fire it.

What's super cool about the Sidewinder is you can slap it onto almost anything. Super Tucanos can carry the Sidewinder. That's a single turboprop counter insurgency aircraft. The idea of a propeller plane armed with heat seeking missiles is pretty neat.

Being the first practical self-guided "fire & forget" missile, the Sidewinder inadvertently became the first robotic system to contravene all three of Isaac Asimov's Laws of Robotics.

It always amazes me - these guys often accomplished these engineering marvels with slide rules and similar technology

The most interesting aspect of the Sidewinder is IMHO the seeker algorithm. The control surfaces actuate to undo any movement of the target location measured on the seeker head. This results in the missile maintaining a constant bearing to the target which, as any navy man would know, guarantees an eventual collision. This is called Proportional Navigation. Very simple, very effective.

I heard an interesting story about the missile Soviets got their hands on. That particular Sidewinder was filled with epoxy resin and engineers have trouble with disassembling it without damaging it, so they gathered talented bone carvers across the country to painstakingly clean all inner components from resin.

It really goes to show how effective the design was that the Sidewinder still has a strong presence today.

They have a cut-away of a sidewinder at the Air Force Armament Museum in Florida, where you can see the internal parts and physically move the front sensor like it is tracking something, and see how it is connected to the ailerons and moves them as it is tracking. It is such a clean simple design that worked!

Despite all the changes made in it - The Sidewinder is still basically the same as it was it began: a 5 inch diameter tube stuffed with best available technology. The one big advantage of The Sidewinder - it basically carries its’ own Fire Control with it. When the seeker head acquires the target - it sends a signal to the pilot’s headphones in the form of a growling noise - which turned into a high pitched whine when locked on.

In the corner of the China Lake museum is a seeker with Cryllic on it. The NOTS team got a Soviet copy of the Sidewinder, reversed engineered that, and improved on their own design based on the Soviet's improvements.

I read the guiding maxim for the design of the Sidewinder was something like: The electrical complexity of a refrigerator and the mechnical complexity of a sliderule.

The anti-radiation variant is called the SideARM or “Sidewinder Anti-Radiation Missile.” Thus, this is one of the only examples where a dad joke became an official military designation

You won't find his name in any annals, but my grandfather, Ralph Hough, managed the developmental machine shop on the base at China Lake, working with engineers to develop prototypes that worked with the technology of the day -- including the Sidewinder. When he retired they made a detailed scale model for him. No idea what happened to it.

As a young chemical engineer, my father worked on refining the propellant for both the Sidewinder and the Sparrow in the 1960s. He was a civilian employee of the United States Navy, and was working for NAVSTIC (Naval Scientific and Technical Intelligence Center).

I worked on the AIM-9 for 23 years. When I retired in 1996, the L and M were the newest. Personally, I think it's a piece of military art and will be around for years ahead. It's compact and deadly. Great video, thanks.

Kudos to the original engineers who didn't let the project go to waste. This kind of thinking is what distinguishes great thinkers from the rest.

The sidewinder is such an elegantly simple yet effective killing machine. The way it frags is one of my favorite pieces of engineering. While other missile designers were mucking about with traditional frag - ball bearings, shrapnel, etc - which is surprisingly difficult to implement in a way where the target would actually be hit instead of flying through a "gap" in the frag, the sidewinder uses an elegantly simple design - a "cylinder" of steel rods that are welded together at alternating ends (so 1 rod would have it's tail connected to another rod's tail, and that other rod would have it's nose connected to the next rod's nose, which has it's tail connected to the next rod's tail, and so on), with an explosive charge running down the center. So when the missile proximity fuses, those rods "scissor" out and create a large, expanding circle 360 degrees around the missile which slices through the target aircraft, and doesn't break apart/have "gaps" in it until it has reached it's maximum diameter.

Imagine today telling your boss you are gonna use company equipment and time for the next 5 years working on something they told you not to, you would fly out of the window in the next 5 secs. People just had good quality of life and work back in those days that is increasingly rare to find nowadays.