G’day Geoff. Western Australia? Another country isn’t it? 😀 Can’t really help you with your inquiry. I was just an Air Radar Techie in the RAF, and later retrained as Navigational Instrument Tech. The radar units were AI23/B and they found, locked on and gave ‘Fire’ and “Breakaway’ signals to the pilot. As far as I know (not having dealt with the missiles themselves) once locked on the radar directed the missile where to look. It’s own, inbuilt tracking system then ‘locked on’ and once withing range, the pilot had the option as to fire or not. If fired, the radar then calculated where the debris would be and a steering ‘dot’ told him which way to go to avoid ingesting great chunks of alloy etc. To do this, the radar took into account, the closing speed of both aircraft, the distance between them at the time of impact and the projected paths that they were both on. The radars in those days could only see for about 160 miles but I don’t know what the missile flight distance was. The missile pack was a self contained unit and probably held more equipment used to actually fire the missiles rather than aid their lock-on. If memory serves me, once one unit was locked on, the radar could engage and lock the other missile to a secondary target. Hope this bit of babble helps.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]219877[/ATTACH]
One of my 74 Sqdn Lightnings fitted with Firestreak missiles.
Sign In
