Development
The Missileer project was cancelled in December 1960, but in the early 1960s Navy made the next interceptor attempt with the F-111B, and they needed a new missile design.
At the same time, the USAF canceled the projects for their land-based high-speed interceptor aircraft, the North American XF-108 Rapier and the Lockheed YF-12, and left the capable AIM-47 Falcon missile at a quite advanced stage of development, but with no effective launch platform.
The AIM-54 Phoenix, developed for the F-111B fleet air defense fighter, had an airframe with 4 cruciform fins that was a scaled-up version of the AIM-47. One characteristic of the Missileer ancestry was that the radar sent it mid-course corrections, which allowed the fire control system to "loft" the missile up over the target into thinner air where it had better range.
The F-111B was canceled in 1968. Its weapons system, the AIM-54 working with the AWG-9 radar, migrated to the new U.S. Navy fighter project, the VFX, which would later become the F-14 Tomcat.
In 1977, development of a significantly improved Phoenix version, the AIM-54C, was developed to better counter projected threats from tactical anti-naval aircraft and cruise missiles, and its final upgrade included a re-programmable memory capability to keep pace with emerging ECM.
In contrast to the Navy, the USAF adopted neither the AIM-47 nor the AIM-54 operationally. Its F-15 Eagle fighter planes have no similar capability at extremely long ranges. The latest AIM-120D AMRAAM has a significantly lower range of about 75 miles (121 km), but the AMRAAM is much shorter, lighter, and more flexible in its use against a wide variety of targets, including fighter planes, bombers, helicopters, patrol planes, and reconnaissance planes. The AMRAAM is also usable by a wide variety of fighter planes, including the F-4, F-15, F-16, F-18, F-22, Panavia Tornado, Eurofighter Typhoon, F-35 Lightning II, Swedish-made fighters, and ground-based launchers of the U.S. Army.
Read more about this topic: AIM-54 Phoenix
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