A glide bomb or stand-off bomb is an aerial bomb with aerodynamic surfaces to give it a flatter, gliding, flight path than that of a conventional bomb without such surfaces. This allows the bomb to be released at a distance from the target rather than right over it, allowing a successful attack without the aircraft needing to survive intact until reaching the target. World War II era glide bombs like the German Fritz X and Henschel Hs 293 pioneered the use of remote control systems, allowing the controlling aircraft to direct the bomb to a pinpoint target as a pioneering form of precision-guided munition.
Note that glide bombing, confusingly, does not refer to the use of glide bombs, but a style of shallow-angle dive bombing.
Read more about Glide Bomb: Post-war Developments
Famous quotes containing the words glide and/or bomb:
“We perceive no charms that are not sharpened, puffed out, and inflated by artifice. Those which glide along naturally and simply easily escape a sight so gross as ours.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it’s been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.”
—John Hersey (b. 1914)