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Aviation History
1959
1959 - 2134.PDF
FLIGHT, 4 September 1959 149 ENGLISH ELECTRIC AVIATION Marconi House, London, W.C2. Telephone: Covent Garden 1234 ThunderMrd It was in October 1948 that the Ministry of Supply decided to place a major contract with English Electric involving a complete surface-to-air missile system. Since that time the company have established a completely new missile plant at Steven- age—which today employs about one-third of the town's working population and at Luton, where the Thunderbird missile system is today in production for the British Army.Early development was concentrated upon test vehicles powered by an internal liquid- propellant motor; later a solid sustainer was adopted and in recent years the entireairframe has been re-engineered in order to fit it for bulk production and arduous operational service, including an overall policy of "maintenance by replacement"wherever practicable. The basic airframe consists of a circular-section body consisting of sections clippedtogether by manacle rings, the nose being a large pointed radome. Guidance is of the semi-active homing variety, the ground equipment including a tactical control radar,where incoming raids are resolved into individual targets and allocated to weapon sites where each target is acquired by a tracking and illuminating radar. Each of the latterradars feeds a number of associated launcher/missile combinations. The entire system is designed to be transportable at normal road speeds, and the launchers can be deployedin fixed installations or on wheeled chassis. Rounds are dispatched in either of two conditions. In the first instance the completemissile is delivered as a series of packaged sub-assemblies, each of which can be removed from its environment-free and shock-proof transit container and built into a missile in amatter of minutes. Alternatively the body may be received in "cigar" form, requiring only functional testing and the addition of wings, fins, warhead, radome and the fourwrap-round boost motors. The complete round is then placed on the launcher elevating frame which is a steel-tube structure with a fixed elevation of 50 deg, carrying the missileby zero-length feet on the lower pair of boost motors. The complete elevating frame is then taken on a special trailer to the launching base, on to which it is moved by a railsystem and secured by a pair of rotary locking shafts. All missile services are fed in through a fly-off head which provides multi-pin electrical and pneumatic connectionsthrough sockets at the base of the body. It is anticipated that Thunderbirds should be capable of being left on launchers in any climate for up to two years. Very extensivefiring trials have taken place at Aberporth and Woomera, and on June 5 last Flight reported a visit to the Army's Thunderbird training school at Manorbier. It was recently announced that a Mk 2 version of Thunderbird is in the course ofdevelopment, claimed to offer substantial advances in range and overall lethality and to be better suited to engaging targets at all altitudes. It has frequently happened in thepast that missiles with semi-active homing guidance have been limited electronically in that the effective range of the radars has been less than the practicable range of the missileup to the point at which the flight speed becomes too low for control to be maintained. Although all details are obviously classified it seems fair to assume that the electronicperformance of Thunderbird Mk 2 must be considerably better than that of the Mk 1 system. FAIREY AVIATION LTD. (Weapon Division) Heston, Middx. Telephone: Hayes 2821 Anti-Tank Missile Not yet officially named, this missile is under development against a Ministry of Supply contract for the British Army. It has been stated that, when fully developed, it should "sweep the heavy tank from the battlefield." Fireflash For more than two years No. 1 Guided Weapon Development Squadronhave been operating Swift F.7 aircraft from Valley on indoctrination missions with these air-to-air missiles. Not released for operational service, Fireflash—originally code-namedBlue Sky—is a beam-rider and consists of an unpowered Dart boosted to supersonic speed by jettisoned motors. This form of propulsion was adopted in order to eliminatethe possibility of introducing guidance errors as a result of ionization of the radio beam by the flame from the motor. In the photograph below a round can be seen immediatelyafter launching; both motors are firing and the weapon has yet to be gathered into the beam transmitted from the nose of the parent aircraft. Launch of a Fireflash from a Swift F.7 fighter English Electric ThumUrbirtl Mk I (Red Shoe*) Four wrap-round boost moton, solid sustainer motor. Length (with or without boosts), 21ft; body diameter, 21 in: span of wings. 63in; span of control tins. 63in. Weight and performance data restricted. Destruction of jet target by a Thunderbird
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