Why It's Sad That The F-22 Just Fired Its First Guided AIM-9X Sidewinder
Tyler Rogoway
5/16/15 5:20pmFiled to: Raptors
Why It's Sad That The F-22 Just Fired Its First Guided AIM-9X Sidewinder
34 years ago, the USAF set out to build a fighter that could guarantee American air superiority for decades to come. $75B, 563 less aircraft than planned, and a decade after being declared operational later, the F-22 still doesn’t have what some MiG-21s have, a Helmet Mounted Sight and a missile to go with it.
Why It's Sad That The F-22 Just Fired Its First Guided AIM-9X Sidewinder
Helmet Mounted Sights (HMS) and High-Off Bore-Sight (HOBS) short-range air-to-air missiles have been around for a long, long time. Helmet Mounted Sights, in their most basic form, allow pilots to just look at their target in order to slew their weapons onto it and engage it. HOBS air-to-air missiles allow for targets to be engaged far off the aircraft’s center-line by using a steerable, gimble-mounted seeker head.
Why It's Sad That The F-22 Just Fired Its First Guided AIM-9X Sidewinder
The South African Air Force (SAAF) was the first to produce and fly with a fairly crude version of a HMS in the 1970s aboard their Mirage F1s fighters, along with their indigenously developed V3B HOBS short-range air-to-air missile.
Meanwhile the US Navy saw the potential in such a concept and tested Honeywell’s Visual Target Acquisition System over a four year period between 1974 and 1978 as part of a larger evaluation of what the future of air-to-air combat could look like. Although the tests were largely successful, nothing more came of the test program aside from a limited number of older F-4 Phantoms continuing to fly with the system for a limited time.
Why It's Sad That The F-22 Just Fired Its First Guided AIM-9X Sidewinder
During the “Border Wars” between Angola and South Africa in the early 1980s, the HMS and HOBS missile proved deadly for Soviet fighters flown by the Angolan forces. Russia took notice and started a high-speed development program to bring HMS and HOBS missile technology to their latest fighter designs. The result was a monocle-like Helmet Mounted Sight system tied to the high off bore-sight AA-11 “Archer” short-range air-tor-air missile.
The Archer and its HMS system were built to be fielded with the 4th generation Russian fighters that went into production in the 1980s. These successful designs included the MiG-29 and Su-27s, with the system originally going operational with the MiG-29 around 1985. Since then, the system has been widely proliferated around the globe and even back-fitted into everything from upgraded MiG-21s and Su-25s to Mi-24 “Hind” helicopter gunships.
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Russia’s system, like the SAAF’s and the one the Navy tested, is relatively simple. The pilot locks a monocle-like lens in front of their eye and simply looks at the target, as much as 40 degrees off the aircraft’s center-line, and the missile looks in the same direction, locking onto the fighter’s heat signature. Once it is locked, which can be instantaneous depending on the conditions, the pilot simply fires the missile and it does the rest.
Why It's Sad That The F-22 Just Fired Its First Guided AIM-9X Sidewinder
What makes the Archer even more deadly and ahead of its time is that it uses a simple form of thrust vectoring instead of control fins alone to steer toward its target, making it extremely maneuverable and surprisingly reliable.
By the mid 1990s, the second generation Archer came out, the AA-11M, which was able to “see” targets 65 degrees off center-line as well as having the ability to better discern between countermeasures and the real target itself. Range, reliability and maneuverability were also improved over the first generation version.
Why It's Sad That The F-22 Just Fired Its First Guided AIM-9X Sidewinder
Meanwhile, and somewhat stunningly, the US and its allies (aside from Israel, who developed and fielded the Python missile and DASH helmet alone) had nothing similar. It was a total capability gap that seemed incredibly strange considering the cost of western high-performance fighter and their technological supremacy. Even America’s best fighters, the F-15, F-16, F/A-18 and F-14, were still packing the AIM-9L/M Sidewinder, a modern variation of a missile dating back to the 1950s which still had a narrow field of view that demanded the fighter’s nose be pointed almost perfectly at the aircraft in order to obtain a “tone,” or lock-on.
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Russia’s hard-turning and rapidly maturing 4th generation fighter aircraft, one of which could point its nose at targets even at very slow speeds (Su-27), had a large advantage within visual range just by fielding the Archer and its associated Helmet Mounted Sight alone. Even with all the importance the US and NATO put on Basic Fighter Maneuvers (dogfighting), the technology simply was not there, and if the ‘balloon went up’ and a real fight were to have ever occurred between the two super powers, Russia’s numerical advantage and its HOBS missile toting fighter fleet could have done serious damage to NATO’s fighter armada.
Why It's Sad That The F-22 Just Fired Its First Guided AIM-9X Sidewinder
Once the Iron Curtain fell and the Cold War came to an end, NATO fighter crews learned just how effective the Archer and Helmet Mounted Sight combo was, with Germany’s ex-East German MiG-29s turning into the Europe’s quasi-aggressor squadron.
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Development of a missile and sighting system that could achieve similar or better performance than the Archer was slow going for NATO allies. By the early 2000s multiple systems were deep in development. The US had its next generation Sidewinder, AIM-9X, and its Joint Helmet Mounted Cuing System, which was a visor-type system that adapted to standard fighter helmets using magnetic spacial tracking, while Europe had the IRIST-T, MICA, ASRAAM missiles and various Helmet Mounted Sights and more advanced Helmet Mounted Displays to integrate with them.
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Why It's Sad That The F-22 Just Fired Its First Guided AIM-9X Sidewinder
The AIM-9X differs from the last iterations of the original AIM-9 Sidewinder almost totally. For all intents and purposes, it’s a brand new missile that shares the older AIM-9’s rocket motor and warhead. It has an Imaging Infrared Seeker, which uses IR energy in the form of a picture, akin to a video camera, to home in on its target. Because the seeker uses an image instead of a simpler infrared source, it is much harder to confuse with decoys and countermeasures and can differentiate between different objects and aircraft. It can also be reprogrammed to deal with new countermeasures and to hit certain targets in certain areas. It also uses thrust vectoring instead of control fins to maneuver to its target, which greatly enhances its overall maneuverability. When employed with a Helmet Mounted Sight or display, the AIM-9X Block I can hit targets as much as 90 degrees of bore-sight and can lock onto targets at much farther ranges under more challenging conditions that its predecessor. Even without a HMS, the AIM-9X is a huge leap in capability and has a much wider angle bore-sight view than the AIM-9M it replaces. It is also much more maintenance friendly.
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