De Havilland Firestreak

De Havilland Firestreak

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De Havilland Firestreak

The de Havilland Propellers Firestreak is a British first-generation, passive infrared homing air-to-air missile. It was developed by de Havilland in the early 1950s and was the first such weapon to enter active service with the Royal Air Force and Fleet Air Arm, equipping the English Electric Lightning, de Havilland Sea Vixen and Gloster Javelin. It was a rear-aspect, fire and forget pursuit weapon, with a field of attack of 20 degrees either side of the target^[1] and was replaced in service by a developed variant, the Hawker Siddeley Red Top.

Development
Service
Development
Operators
References

Development

Lightning with Firestreak missiles.

The Firestreak was the result of a series of projects that began with the OR.1056 Red Hawk missile. When this proved too ambitious for the then state-of-the-art, a lower performance specification was released in 1951 as OR.1117, and given the Ministry of Supply rainbow codename Blue Jay.

Blue Jay developed as a fairly conventional-looking missile with cropped delta wings mounted just rear of the midpoint and small rectangular control surfaces in tandem towards the rear. Internally, things were considerably more complex. The rear-mounted controls were operated by nose-mounted actuators via long pushrods. The actuators were powered by compressed air from bottles at the rear. The warhead was also at the rear, wrapped around the exhaust of the Magpie rocket. The Lead-Tellurium (PbTe) IR seeker was mounted under an eight-faceted conical Arsenic Trisulphide "pencil" nose and was cooled to -180° C (-292° F) by anhydrous ammonia to improve the signal to noise ratio. There were two rows of triangular windows in bands around the forward fuselage, behind which sat the optical proximity fuses for the warhead. In the photo (below) of the Firestreak on its trolley, the fuze windows are visible adjacent to the red rubber bands used to protect the fuze windows.

Service

A Firestreak on its trolley.

The first airborne launch of Blue Jay took place in 1955 from a de Havilland Venom, the target drone - a Fairey Firefly - being destroyed ^[1]. Blue Jay Mk.1 entered service in 1957 with the RAF, where it was named the Firestreak. For launch, the missile seeker was slaved to the launch aircraft's radar (Ferranti AIRPASS in the Lightning and GEC AI.18 in the Sea Vixen until lock was achieved and the weapons was launched, leaving the interceptor free to acquire another target.

Development

Firestreak was developed into Blue Jay Mk.4 and Blue Vesta, which would ultimately enter active service and replace it as the Red Top, from 1964. It remained in limited service until the final retirement of the Lightning in 1988; the carriage of these missiles improving the aircraft's aerodynamics.

An important difference between the Firestreak missile and Red Top was the electronics technology used. Firestreak electronics used thermionic valves, which were "wired in" to the control / guidance electronics and required a system of cooling pipes to remove the heat generated by the valve filaments. For this reason, the Firestreak missile on ground test was cooled by Arcton and on the aircraft by the ammonia, pumped through the missile from the parent aircraft. The Red Top electronics were constructed using transistors that did not require cooling, but were heated instead.