The Legendary Sidewinder Missile Made Its First Kill Over The Taiwan Strait
Dogfights over the Taiwan Strait 63 years ago provided the perfect opportunity to test America's promising new missile in combat.
By Thomas Newdick September 28, 2021
It’s no exaggeration to say that the appearance of the heat-seeking Sidewinder air-to-air missile transformed aerial warfare forever. The now-ubiquitous AIM-9 is still the short-range weapon of choice for most Western air arms, but how it came to be first proven in combat is less well known. It was over the Taiwan Strait, a region at least as tense in the 1950s as it is today, that the missile scored the first of its many kills, in dramatic clashes between Taiwanese and Communist Chinese jet fighters.
Taiwan’s Republic of China Air Force (ROCAF) obtained its first Sidewinders in 1958, at the height of the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, becoming the first foreign country to get its hands on them.
As for the fascinating origin story of the Sidewinder in the early 1950s, that’s something that The War Zone has explored in the past, and you can read about it here. There’s no doubt that, from its modest beginnings, the missile — named after the heat-seeking rattlesnake of the Mojave Desert — quickly exceeded the expectations of its developers at the Naval Ordnance Test Station in China Lake, California.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/42544/the-legendary-sidewinder-missile-made-its-first-kill-over-the-taiwan-strait