Sky Scorcher was a nuclear-armed

air-to-air missile An air-to-air missile (AAM) is a missile fired from an aircraft for the purpose of destroying another aircraft (including unmanned aircraft such as cruise missiles). AAMs are typically powered by one or more rocket motors, usually solid-fuel roc ...

proposed to the

United States Air Force The United States Air Force (USAF) is the Air force, air service branch of the United States Department of Defense. It is one of the six United States Armed Forces and one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. Tracing its ori ...

in the 1950s. Intended for use as a weapon for the disruption of enemy bomber formations, it failed to find favor among Air Force planners and did not undergo development.

Development

The Sky Scorcher project was proposed by the Convair Division of

General Dynamics General Dynamics Corporation (GD) is an American publicly traded aerospace and defense corporation headquartered in Reston, Virginia. As of 2020, it was the fifth largest defense contractor in the world by arms sales and fifth largest in the Unit ...

to the United States Air Force in 1956. The missile was intended to be carried by an advanced, enlarged version of Convair's

F-106 Delta Dart The Convair F-106 Delta Dart is an all-weather interceptor aircraft designed and produced by the American aircraft manufacturer Convair. The F-106 was designed in response to the 1954 interceptor program. Envisioned as an imagined "Ultimate In ...

interceptor,Parsch 2007 which had, at the time, not yet entered flight testing even in its baseline form.Peacock 1986, p.200. Sky Scorcher was a very large missile, which was projected to be capable of carrying a thermonuclear warhead with a yield of two

megatons TNT equivalent is a convention for expressing energy, typically used to describe the energy released in an explosion. A ton of TNT equivalent is a unit of energy defined by convention to be (). It is the approximate energy released in the det ...

. The oversized warhead would be used against attacking formations of supersonic bombers; it was anticipated that fourteen such

initiations Initiation is a rite of passage marking entrance or acceptance into a group or society. It could also be a formal admission to adulthood in a community or one of its formal components. In an extended sense, it can also signify a transformatio ...

, at a distance of approximately from the bombers' target, would be sufficient to disrupt an attack. A force of eighty of the advanced fighters were proposed for carrying the weapon. Despite Convair's sales pitch and the anticipated effectiveness of the weapon, the Air Force was unenthusiastic about the concept; aside from the expense of developing the aircraft and weapon, the Sky Scorcher missile also suffered from the fact that there would be significant effects on the ground below the location of an airburst of a multi-megaton nuclear warhead. As a result, the project was abandoned before any significant work was undertaken.

References

Notes

Bibliography

* * * Peacock, Lindsay. "Delta Dart...Last of the Century Fighters". ''

Air International ''AIR International'' is a British aviation magazine covering current defence aerospace and civil aviation topics. It has been in publication since 1971 and is currently published by Key Publishing Ltd. History and profile The magazine was fir ...

'', Vol. 31, No 4, October 1986, pp. 198–206, 217. Stamford, UK: Fine Scroll. {{USAF missiles Proposed weapons of the United States Nuclear missiles of the United States Abandoned military rocket and missile projects of the United States