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:
“Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“...I believed passionately that Communists were a race of horned men who divided their time equally between the burning of Nancy Drew books and the devising of a plan of nuclear attack that would land the largest and most lethal bomb squarely upon the third-grade class of Thomas Jefferson School in Morristown, New Jersey.”
—Fran Lebowitz (b. 1950)