
The de Havilland Firestreak is a British first-generation, passive
infrared homing
Infrared homing is a Missile guidance#Passive homing, passive weapon guidance system which uses the infrared (IR) light emission from a target to track and follow it seamlessly. Missiles which use infrared seeking are often referred to as "he ...
(heat seeking)
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 ...
. It was developed by
de Havilland Propellers
de Havilland Propellers was established in 1935, as a division of the de Havilland Aircraft company when that company acquired a licence from the Hamilton Standard company of America for the manufacture of variable-pitch propellers at a cost ...
(later
Hawker Siddeley
Hawker Siddeley was a group of British manufacturing companies engaged in list of aircraft manufacturers, aircraft production. Hawker Siddeley combined the legacies of several British aircraft manufacturers, emerging through a series of mergers ...
) in the early 1950s, entering service in 1957. It was the first such weapon to enter active service with the
Royal Air Force
The Royal Air Force (RAF) is the Air force, air and space force of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies. It was formed towards the end of the World War I, First World War on 1 April 1918, on the merger of t ...
(RAF) and
Fleet Air Arm
The Fleet Air Arm (FAA) is the naval aviation component of the United Kingdom's Royal Navy (RN). The FAA is one of five :Fighting Arms of the Royal Navy, RN fighting arms. it is a primarily helicopter force, though also operating the Lockhee ...
, equipping the
English Electric Lightning
The English Electric Lightning is a British fighter aircraft that served as an interceptor during the 1960s, the 1970s and into the late 1980s. It is capable of a top speed above Mach 2. The Lightning was designed, developed, and manufactured ...
,
de Havilland Sea Vixen
The de Havilland DH.110 Sea Vixen is a British twin-engine, twin boom-tailed, two-seat, carrier-based fleet air-defence fighter flown by the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm from the 1950s to the early 1970s. The Sea Vixen was designed by the de Havi ...
and
Gloster Javelin
The Gloster Javelin is a twin-engined all-weather interceptor aircraft designed and produced by the Gloster Aircraft Company. It was operated by the Royal Air Force from the mid-1950s until the late 1960s and was the final aircraft design to b ...
. It was a
rear-aspect,
fire and forget
Fire-and-forget is a type of missile guidance which does not require further external intervention after launch such as illumination of the target or wire guidance, and can hit its target without the launcher being in line-of-sight of the targ ...
pursuit weapon, with a field of attack of 20 degrees either side of the target.
[Gibson 2007, p. 33]
Developed under the
rainbow code "Blue Jay", Firestreak was the third heat-seeking missile to enter service, after the US
AIM-4 Falcon
The Hughes AIM-4 Falcon was the first operational guided air-to-air missile of the United States Air Force. Development began in 1946; the weapon was first tested in 1949. The missile entered service with the USAF in 1956.
Produced in both heat- ...
and
AIM-9 Sidewinder
The AIM-9 Sidewinder is a short-range air-to-air missile. Entering service with the United States Navy in 1956 and the Air Force in 1964, the AIM-9 is one of the oldest, cheapest, and most successful air-to-air missiles. Its latest variants rema ...
, both of which entered service the previous year. In comparison to those designs, the Firestreak was larger and almost twice as heavy, carrying a much larger warhead. It had otherwise similar performance in terms of speed and range. It was also a very complex system, with an unusual internal design, requiring the launch aircraft to provide both cooling for its
valve-based electronics and heating to prevent various moving parts from freezing prior to launch.
An improved version, "Blue Vesta", was developed as part of the
Operational Requirement F.155
Operational Requirement F.155 was a specification issued by the British Ministry of Supply on 15 January 1955 for an interceptor aircraft to defend the United Kingdom from Soviet Union, Soviet high-flying nuclear-armed supersonic bombers.
Discus ...
project but ended when that project was canceled in 1957. Development restarted as a somewhat simpler version for the Lightning which was given the name "Red Top". This featured
transistor
A transistor is a semiconductor device used to Electronic amplifier, amplify or electronic switch, switch electrical signals and electric power, power. It is one of the basic building blocks of modern electronics. It is composed of semicondu ...
ized electronics and greatly simplified internal design. Keeping its code name, it entered service on Lightning and Sea Vixen as the
Hawker Siddeley Red Top
The Hawker Siddeley (later British Aerospace) Red Top was the third indigenous British air-to-air missile to enter service, following the de Havilland Firestreak and limited-service Fireflash. It was used to replace the Firestreak on the de Havil ...
. Red Top could not be carried on early versions of the Lightning, and so Firestreak remained in service until 1988, when the last RAF Lightnings retired.
Development
Red Hawk
Firestreak was the result of a series of projects begun with the OR.1056
Red Hawk missile, which called for an all-aspect seeker that could attack a target from any launch position. When this proved too ambitious for the
state of the art
The state of the art (SOTA or SotA, sometimes cutting edge, leading edge, or bleeding edge) refers to the highest level of general development, as of a device, technique, or scientific field achieved at a particular time. However, in some contex ...
, another specification lacking the all-aspect requirement was released as Blue Sky, which briefly entered service as
Fireflash the year before Firestreak.
Blue Jay
In 1951 the
Royal Aircraft Establishment
The Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) was a British research establishment, known by several different names during its history, that eventually came under the aegis of the Ministry of Defence (United Kingdom), UK Ministry of Defence (MoD), bef ...
(RAE), in charge of missile development, felt that
infrared seeking
Infrared (IR; sometimes called infrared light) is electromagnetic radiation (EMR) with wavelengths longer than that of visible light but shorter than microwaves. The infrared spectral band begins with the waves that are just longer than those of ...
had progressed to the point of reconsidering the Red Hawk requirement. This too turned out to be too demanding for the seekers of the era, although a more limited tail-aspect design was clearly possible in the short term. This was given the name "Pink Hawk". This led to an official specification for a lower-performance Red Hawk that was released in 1951 as OR.1117, and given the
Ministry of Supply
The Ministry of Supply (MoS) was a department of the UK government formed on 1 August 1939 by the Ministry of Supply Act 1939 ( 2 & 3 Geo. 6. c. 38) to co-ordinate the supply of equipment to all three British armed forces, headed by the Ministe ...
rainbow codename Blue Jay.
Blue Jay developed as a fairly conventional-looking missile with cropped delta wings mounted just aft of the midpoint and small rectangular control surfaces in tandem towards the rear. Internally, things were considerably more complex. The tube-based electronics took up most of the forward quarter of the fuselage, leaving little room for a warhead. This led to the warhead being moved to the rear of the fuselage where it was wrapped around the rocket nozzle. That left no room for the actuators for the rear-mounted control fins, which were instead operated by nose-mounted actuators via long pushrods. The actuators were powered by compressed air from bottles at the extreme rear, fed forward through long pipes. The air bottles also powered a turbo-alternator for electrical power after launch. In the case of a miss, the missile self-destructed when the alternator slowed down after the air ran out.
The Magpie rocket motor took up only a small portion of the missile fuselage, placed between the actuators and the warhead, roughly centred under the mid-mounted wings. It consisted of of
cordite
Cordite is a family of smokeless propellants developed and produced in Britain since 1889 to replace black powder as a military firearm propellant. Like modern gunpowder, cordite is classified as a low explosive because of its slow burni ...
that burned for 1.9 seconds, exiting the rear of the missile via a long tailpipe running through the rear section of the missile.
The
lead telluride
Lead telluride is a compound of lead (element), lead and tellurium (PbTe). It crystallizes in the NaCl crystal structure with Pb atoms occupying the cation and Te forming the anionic lattice. It is a narrow gap semiconductor with a band gap of 0.3 ...
(PbTe) IR seeker was mounted under an eight-faceted conical
arsenic trisulphide
Arsenic trisulfide is the inorganic compound with the formula . It is a dark yellow solid that is insoluble in water. It also occurs as the mineral orpiment (Latin: auripigmentum), which has been used as a pigment called King's yellow. It is produc ...
"pencil" nose and was cooled to to improve the
signal-to-noise ratio
Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR or S/N) is a measure used in science and engineering that compares the level of a desired signal to the level of background noise. SNR is defined as the ratio of signal power to noise power, often expressed in deci ...
. The unusual faceted nose was chosen when a more conventional hemispherical nose proved prone to ice accretion.
[Gibson 2007, p. 34] The seeker was cooled by running filtered air through an ammonia-cooled
heat exchanger
A heat exchanger is a system used to transfer heat between a source and a working fluid. Heat exchangers are used in both cooling and heating processes. The fluids may be separated by a solid wall to prevent mixing or they may be in direct contac ...
.
There were two rows of triangular windows in bands around the forward fuselage, behind which sat the optical
proximity fuze
A Proximity Fuse (also VT fuse or "variable time fuze") is a fuse that detonates an explosive device automatically when it approaches within a certain distance of its target. Proximity fuses are designed for elusive military targets such as air ...
s for the warhead. The prodigious warhead had a lethal radius and was triggered either by the proximity fuzes or four contact fuses set on the front of the wings. The outer casing of the warhead was designed to fragment into pieces fired forward in a 50 degree cone.
The electronics, made from
vacuum tube
A vacuum tube, electron tube, thermionic valve (British usage), or tube (North America) is a device that controls electric current flow in a high vacuum between electrodes to which an electric voltage, potential difference has been applied. It ...
s, generated significant heat. For this reason, the Firestreak missile undergoing a ground test was cooled by
Arcton, and in-flight by
ammonia
Ammonia is an inorganic chemical compound of nitrogen and hydrogen with the chemical formula, formula . A Binary compounds of hydrogen, stable binary hydride and the simplest pnictogen hydride, ammonia is a colourless gas with a distinctive pu ...
pumped through the missile from bottles in the rear of the launching "shoe". The bottles contained enough ammonia for 15 minutes, so the missile could only be started up during the approach. An air bottle in the fuselage-mounted weapon pack kept the ammonia bottles pressurized before launch. Hot air from the engine compressor stages connected to the rear of the launch pack and was routed to the missiles. During flight, this kept various moving components warm, warm enough that they would not freeze up during the 13 second flight time.
Service

The first airborne launch of Blue Jay took place in 1954 from a
de Havilland Venom
The de Havilland DH 112 Venom is a British post-war single-engined jet aircraft developed and manufactured by the de Havilland, de Havilland Aircraft Company. Much of its design was derived from the de Havilland Vampire, the firm's first jet-p ...
, the
target drone
A target drone is an unmanned aerial vehicle, generally remote controlled, usually used in the training of anti-aircraft crews.
One of the earliest drones was the British DH.82 Queen Bee, a variant of the Tiger Moth trainer aircraft operation ...
- a
Fairey Firefly
The Fairey Firefly is a Second World War-era carrier-borne fighter aircraft and anti-submarine aircraft that was principally operated by the Fleet Air Arm (FAA). It was developed and built by the British aircraft manufacturer Fairey Aviation ...
- being destroyed.
Blue Jay Mk.1 entered service in 1957 with the RAF, where it was named Firestreak. Firestreak was deployed by the Royal Navy and the RAF in August 1958;
[ it was the first effective British air-to-air missile.][Boyne, Walter J, ''Air Warfare: an International Encyclopedia, Volume 1'']
pub ABC-CLIO Inc, 2002, p267.
For launch, the missile seeker was slaved to the launch aircraft's radar (Ferranti
Ferranti International PLC or simply Ferranti was a UK-based electrical engineering and equipment firm that operated for over a century, from 1885 until its bankruptcy in 1993. At its peak, Ferranti was a significant player in power grid system ...
AIRPASS in the Lightning and GEC AI.18 in the Sea Vixen) until lock was achieved and the weapon was launched, leaving the interceptor free to acquire another target.[Gibson 2007, p. 35] A downside was that the missile was highly toxic (due to either the ''Magpie'' rocket motor or the ammonia coolant) and RAF armourers had to wear some form of CRBN protection to safely mount the missile onto an aircraft. "Unlike modern 990s
The 990s decade ran from January 1, 990, to December 31, 999.
Significant people
* Al-Qadir
* Mahmud of Ghazni
* Pope John XV
* Pope Gregory V
References
{{Reflist
...
missiles, ... Firestreak could only be fired outside cloud, and in winter, skies were rarely clear over the UK."[Black, Ian, ''The Last of the Lightnings'', pub PSL, 1996, , p141.]
Improvements
Two minor Blue Jay variants were studied but not adopted. The Blue Jay Mk.2 included the more powerful Magpie II motor and a PbTe seeker which offered better detection capabilities. Blue Jay Mk.3 had an increased wingspan and reduced performance motor. The derated motor was intended to limit acceleration when launched from supersonic rocket-powered interceptors such as the Saunders-Roe SR.177
The Saunders-Roe SR.177 was a 1950s project to develop a combined jet- and rocket-powered interceptor aircraft for the Royal Air Force (RAF) and Royal Navy. It was an enlarged derivative of the Saunders-Roe SR.53, which was itself an exper ...
and Avro 720, where the additional speed imparted by the Magpie II would have given it a maximum speed so high it would suffer from adverse aerodynamic heating.
Looking for an improved weapon for the Operational Requirement F.155
Operational Requirement F.155 was a specification issued by the British Ministry of Supply on 15 January 1955 for an interceptor aircraft to defend the United Kingdom from Soviet Union, Soviet high-flying nuclear-armed supersonic bombers.
Discus ...
interceptors, in 1955 the Air Ministry issued OR.1131 for an all-aspect design capability against enemy aircraft traveling at Mach 2. De Havilland responded with Blue Jay Mk.4, which was later given its own rainbow code, Blue Vesta. This adopted the PbTe seeker of Mk.2, further improved by cooling it to improve its sensitivity in what became known as the "Violet Banner" seeker. The motor was further upgraded to the new Magpie III. To handle the aerodynamic heating issues, the fins were made of steel rather than aluminum, and featured cut-away sections to keep the rear portions of the surfaces out of the Mach cones, a feature they referred to as "mach tips". Work on Mk.4 was curtailed after 1956 as the RAE decided that the closing speeds of two Mach 2+ aircraft would be so rapid that the missile would have no chance to be launched while still within the range of its seeker.
In August 1956, the Fleet Air Arm
The Fleet Air Arm (FAA) is the naval aviation component of the United Kingdom's Royal Navy (RN). The FAA is one of five :Fighting Arms of the Royal Navy, RN fighting arms. it is a primarily helicopter force, though also operating the Lockhee ...
took over development of the Blue Jay line with Blue Jay Mk.5, replacing the IR seeker with a semi-active radar homing
Semi-active radar homing (SARH) is a common type of missile guidance system, perhaps the most common type for longer-range air-to-air and surface-to-air missile systems. The name refers to the fact that the missile itself is only a passive dete ...
(SARH) system intended to be used with the De Havilland Sea Vixen
The de Havilland DH.110 Sea Vixen is a British twin-engine, twin boom-tailed, two-seat, carrier-based fleet air-defence fighter flown by the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm from the 1950s to the early 1970s. The Sea Vixen was designed by the de Havi ...
's AI.18 radar with a special continual wave illuminator mode. This was otherwise identical to Mk.4, differing only by replacing its seeker section with a longer ogive nose cone holding the radar receiver antenna. Problems fitting the illuminator antenna to the Sea Vixen ended work on this project. In November 1957 it was briefly restarted under the name Blue Dolphin as other radar-guided developments ended, but this was never deployed.
Red Top
After the fallout of the 1957 Defence White Paper
The 1957 White Paper on Defence (Cmnd. 124) was a British white paper issued in March 1957 setting forth the perceived future of the British military. It had profound effects on all aspects of the defence industry but probably the most affected wa ...
led to the cancellation of the F.155 and many other aircraft and missile projects, the English Electric Lightning
The English Electric Lightning is a British fighter aircraft that served as an interceptor during the 1960s, the 1970s and into the late 1980s. It is capable of a top speed above Mach 2. The Lightning was designed, developed, and manufactured ...
was allowed to continue largely because development was almost complete. This left it with no modern weapon, so Blue Vesta was reactivated in a slightly modified form.[ In November 1957, paperwork with the Blue Vesta name on it was considered disclosed and the project was assigned the new name "Red Top".
In contrast to the Mk.4 there were several important changes. The adoption of ]transistor
A transistor is a semiconductor device used to Electronic amplifier, amplify or electronic switch, switch electrical signals and electric power, power. It is one of the basic building blocks of modern electronics. It is composed of semicondu ...
ized circuits in place of the former thermionic valve
Thermionic emission is the liberation of charged particles from a hot electrode whose thermal energy gives some particles enough kinetic energy to escape the material's surface. The particles, sometimes called ''thermions'' in early literature, ar ...
s eliminated the need for cooling the electronics, as well as making the guidance section significantly smaller. This allowed the warhead to be moved from its former position near the tail to the midsection, which also allowed it to grow in size and weight, replacing the former blast-fragmentation type with an expanding-rod system that was significantly deadlier. The rear section of the missile was now left empty, allowing the fin actuators to be moved there, removing the complex routing. This still left more room that was used up by replacing the Magpie III with the new Linnet, which offered significantly higher performance and boosted the typical top speed of the missile from Mach 2.4 to 3.2 whilst almost doubling effective range to .
Given the elimination of the ammonia cooling, which was also used by the Violet Banner seeker of the Mk.4, the decision was made to use a simplified seeker that did not require cooling to the same level. This led to a new indium antimonide
Indium antimonide (InSb) is a crystalline compound made from the elements indium (In) and antimony (Sb). It is a narrow- gap semiconductor material from the III- V group used in infrared detectors, including thermal imaging cameras, FLIR sy ...
(InSb) design that was cooled with purified air at filtered to 3 μm
The micrometre (Commonwealth English as used by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures; SI symbol: μm) or micrometer (American English), also commonly known by the non-SI term micron, is a unit of length in the International System ...
. This reduced its sensitivity compared to Violet Banner, lacking its true all-aspect ability, but further simplified the design and eliminated ground handling concerns.
Never given its own name by the RAF, the new design entered service in 1964 as Red Top. It was faster and had a longer range than Firestreak,[ and "was capable of all aspect homing against super-sonic targets."][ Despite Red Top being intended to replace Firestreak, Firestreak remained in limited service until the final retirement of the Lightning in 1988; carrying Red Top required more vertical tail to stabilize the effects of the missile's larger wings, so Firestreak remained in use on older models of the Lightning.
]
Operators
Past operators
;
* Kuwait Air Force
The Kuwait Air Force () is the air arm of the Armed Forces of Kuwait. The Air Force headquarters is located at Abdullah Al-Mubarak Air Base, with the remaining forces stationed at Air Defense Brigades, Ali Al Salem Air Base and Ahmad al-Jaber ...
;
* Royal Saudi Air Force
The Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF; ) is the military aviation, aviation branch of the Armed Forces of Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabian Armed Forces.
The Royal Saudi Air Force currently has wings, squadrons, and a special forces unit dedicated to comba ...
;
* Royal Air Force
The Royal Air Force (RAF) is the Air force, air and space force of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies. It was formed towards the end of the World War I, First World War on 1 April 1918, on the merger of t ...
* Royal Navy
The Royal Navy (RN) is the naval warfare force of the United Kingdom. It is a component of His Majesty's Naval Service, and its officers hold their commissions from the King of the United Kingdom, King. Although warships were used by Kingdom ...
, Fleet Air Arm
The Fleet Air Arm (FAA) is the naval aviation component of the United Kingdom's Royal Navy (RN). The FAA is one of five :Fighting Arms of the Royal Navy, RN fighting arms. it is a primarily helicopter force, though also operating the Lockhee ...
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
*
*
*
External links
The de Havilland Firestreak
The Jet Age Museum - exhibits one
{{UKmissiles
Cold War air-to-air missiles of the United Kingdom
Firestreak
The de Havilland Firestreak is a British first-generation, passive infrared homing (heat seeking) air-to-air missile. It was developed by de Havilland Propellers (later Hawker Siddeley) in the early 1950s, entering service in 1957. It was the fir ...
Military equipment introduced in the 1950s
Fire-and-forget weapons
De Havilland
Firestreak
The de Havilland Firestreak is a British first-generation, passive infrared homing (heat seeking) air-to-air missile. It was developed by de Havilland Propellers (later Hawker Siddeley) in the early 1950s, entering service in 1957. It was the fir ...