FOX TWO — the AIM-9 Sidewinder, the round that wins knife fights
The Sidewinder is the round for the fight that has collapsed to a few kilometres: 850 m/s, the tightest turn rate on the rail, and an infrared seeker that flares can still fool.
Every pilot in the sim carries the Sidewinder, and every pilot eventually learns what it is for: the fight that has already collapsed to a few kilometres, where the radar rounds are too slow to turn and the gun is too late.
Where it came from
The real AIM-9 was led by Dr. William B. McLean at the Naval Ordnance Test Station, China Lake. An experimental round was first fired on 21 August 1952 and flew the wrong way; the first successful launch followed on 9 January 1954. Its first combat kill came on 24 September 1958, when a Chinese Nationalist F-86F pilot downed a MiG-17 near the Formosa Strait. The principle never changed: passive infrared homing, a seeker that simply follows hot exhaust and emits nothing for the target to detect.
The AIM-9 by the numbers (in the sim)
- Top speed: 850 m/s, accelerating at 320 m/s².
- Turn rate: 3.2 — the tightest of the Western rounds; the AIM-120 manages 1.9, the Sparrow 1.6.
- Seeker: infrared. It cannot be jammed by chaff and does not need your radar to hold a lock.
- Motor and life: 2.2 seconds of burn, 22 seconds in the air.
- Loadout: two on the Hornet and Hawg, and two ’Winders on the F-14 alongside its Phoenixes and Sparrows.
Why it wins knife fights
That turn rate is the whole story. At close range the Sidewinder out-pulls nearly anything it is chasing, and unlike the Sparrow it does not need you to keep a lock once it is away. The trade-off is that a heat-seeker is only as good as the heat it is looking at: a flare dropped inside 1,500 m has a 75% chance of fooling it, and a hard break at close range can shake it too. Flares beat IR. Chaff beats radar. Knowing which is which keeps you alive; the stores callouts tell you what is on the rail.
The round now looks the part, too: fins, nozzle and a live exhaust cone while the motor burns, as seen in the lineup above (the Sidewinder is the one on the far left; the others are the AIM-120, Phoenix and Sparrow). Each body is in the Print Bay if you want one on your desk.
Try this: cycle to AIM-9 with ENTER, fire with SPACE, then hit F to drop flares the moment a bandit shoots back — and note how quickly 22 seconds runs out.
— HB