For some reason I keep on getting drawn back to this thread 🤔......
Thanks! Me, too!
Now I fully appreciate the short comings of the Aim-4A/B Falcon AAM, but the question I'd like to put to the forum is whether the Aim-4 Falcon could have been improved? What was the main fault of the Aim-4 - seeker? motor? aerodynamic properties?
Now I appreciate that once the USAF dropped it's obsession of the Aim-4 in favour of the Aim-9 Sidewinder, so too was any real notion or impetuous to either seriously fix or develop the Aim-4, so as to fix it's inherent problem(s). But in truth, the Aim-4 Falcon would still be employed in frontline defence by the USAF (F-106), RCAF (F-101B), Greek and Turkish Air Forces (F-102), Swiss Air Force (Mirage IIIS) and Swedish and Finnish Air Force (J 35 Draken), so realistically there was room and a requirement to improve the Aim-4 Falcon missile, was there not?
I can't but help notice that there was a program to fix the known deficiencies of the Falcon - the XAIM-4H, which had a laser proximity fuze, new warhead, and better maneuverability. It was cancelled the following year without entering service....
On top of this, given the poor reliability of the R530 missile, wouldn't two questionable Aim-4 Falcon's give a better kill probability, whilst also allowing the carriage of the centreline drop tank in the process?🤔
So, it's interesting that you mention this and ask some of these questions, MAD. I'd recommend watching some of the
interviews and videos featuring retired F-102 and F-106 pilot Bruce Gordon, who fired live AIM-4 Falcons on numerous occasions.
I'd also recommend Sean O'Connor's excellent article on the AIM-4 Falcon, as well as anything else Sean O'Connor has written, to be honest:
Arming America’s Interceptors: The Hughes Falcon Missile Family by Sean O'Connor, BA, MS (AMU)Finally, as a preface to what I'm about to say, I do want to say that I've read the Swiss-specific modifications to the Mirage III were far more expensive and took longer than originally intended and never worked as well with the Falcons as it was hoped. I can't remember where, but I think it was in one of my books on the Mirage. I'll post it if I ever come across it again.
All that having been said, I think the AIM-4 Falcon has gotten somewhat of an unfairly bad reputation because it was never used in combat with aircraft it was really designed from the outset for.
The F-4 Phantom II that carried it to combat in Vietnam was originally the Navy F4H-1 and intended only to use the Sidewinder and Sparrow. The F-4C & D jury-rigged Falcons onto the aircraft per USAF requirement, but it was always an afterthought and that's the reason it never worked well. What we don't appreciate about the AIM-4 Falcon is that it was a bit of a dumb missile on its own and required a
lot of input from the parent aircraft avionics to work
optimally. You could launch it from other aircraft and it would technically work, but relying only on its onboard sensors was never going to yield very good results.
It's like faulting the performance of MiG-21 or MiG-23 interceptors outside of the GCI environment they were designed from the outset to rely upon. Or taking a train and putting it on a concrete road, then complaining about how inefficient it is.
When the AIM-4 was married with the Hughes MA-1 on the F-106 and datalinked into the SAGE network, it worked pretty darn well, often better than the Sidewinder or Sparrow ever could. Part of the reason the F-106 never got Sidewinders and Sparrows is that the Falcon worked just fine for it, thank you very much. And the F-106 community would gladly take whatever Falcons nobody else wanted. It's just that the above combination was (thankfully) never tested in a shooting war. Oh, and all those space-age vacuum tube avionics were insanely expensive. You could get something like 2.5x F-4 Phantom IIs for the cost of one F-106, which is mind-boggling when you think about it.
By comparison, the AIM-9 Sidewinder was relatively dumb and simple. It's performance plateaued quickly compared to an F-106 weapons system. But it was also relatively cheap, reliable, and
very easy to integrate on existing aircraft with no loss in efficiency. Choosing that as the development path of the future was unquestionably the right choice for the US, to say nothing of the rest of the world.
All that having been said, I think because the F-106 only ever carried Falcons, we discount its deadliness. I don't think a better interceptor weapon system existed in service prior to the F-14 Tomcat, and I don't think I'd have wanted to meet one in the skies over North America in a Sidewinder/Sparrow-armed F-4, let alone flying anything else.
Cheers,
Logan
