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

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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

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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

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, 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". ''

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'', 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