Sky Scorcher was a nuclear-armed
air-to-air missile
The newest and the oldest member of Rafael's Python family of AAM for comparisons, Python-5 (displayed lower-front) and Shafrir-1 (upper-back)
An air-to-air missile (AAM) is a missile fired from an aircraft for the purpose of destroying a ...
proposed to the
United States Air Force
The United States Air Force (USAF) is the air service branch of the United States Armed Forces, and is one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. Originally created on 1 August 1907, as a part of the United States Army Signal ...
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 5th largest in the Uni ...
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 was the primary all-weather interceptor aircraft of the United States Air Force from the 1960s through to the 1980s. Designed as the so-called "Ultimate Interceptor", it proved to be the last specialist interceptor ...
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. The is a unit of energy defined by that convention to be , which is the approximate energy released in the detonation of a m ...
.
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 transformation ...
, 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