10 Facts About AIM-9 Sidewinder

AIM-9 Sidewinder is a short-range air-to-air missile which entered service with the US Navy in 1956 and subsequently was adopted by the US Air Force in 1964.

Since then the AIM-9 Sidewinder has proved to be an enduring international success, and its latest variants remain standard equipment in most Western-aligned air forces.

The AIM-9 Sidewinder is one of the oldest, lowest cost, and most successful air-to-air missiles, with an estimated 270 aircraft kills in its history of use.

AIM-9 Sidewinder is not guided by the actual position recorded by the detector, but by the change in position since the last sighting.

Development of the Sidewinder missile began in 1946 at the Naval Ordnance Test Station, Inyokern, California, now the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, as an in-house research project conceived by William B McLean.

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The name AIM-9 Sidewinder was selected in 1950 and is the common name of Crotalus cerastes, a venomous rattlesnake, which uses infrared sensory organs to hunt warm-blooded prey.

Soviet engineers later said that the captured AIM-9 Sidewinder served as a "university course" in missile design and substantially improved Soviet air-to-air capabilities.

The AIM-9X entered service in November 2003 with the USAF and the USN and is a substantial upgrade to the Sidewinder family featuring an imaging infrared focal-plane array seeker with claimed 90° off-boresight capability, compatibility with helmet-mounted displays such as the new U S Joint Helmet Mounted Cueing System, and a totally new two-axis thrust-vectoring control system providing increased turn capability over traditional control surfaces .

The need for the AIM-9 to have an increased range was caused by digital radio frequency memory jammers that can blind the onboard radar of an AIM-120D AMRAAM, so the Sidewinder Block III's passive imaging infrared homing guidance system was seen as a useful alternative.

On 28 February 2018, the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps unveiled an anti-tank derivative of the AIM-9 Sidewinder missile named "Azarakhsh" intended for use by Bell AH-1J SeaCobra attack helicopters.