Innovative Solution for Stealthy Fighter Jets Challenge

This post is also available in: עברית (Hebrew)

Stealthy fighter jets suffer from a major problem: They must store all of their fuel, sensors, and weapons internally. While previous-generation fighters stored this equipment on the fuselage and wingtips, having a collection of pointy missiles, bombs, and fuel tanks hanging off an aircraft can dramatically increase its radar signature. Fifth-generation fighters like the F-22 and F-35 store everything internally, particularly weapons, maximizing the ability of their carefully molded shapes to evade radar. However, the amount of weapons a plane can carry is limited by the size of its weapons bays. 

The new Peregrine missile unveiled recently by Raytheon is designed to boost the firepower of fighter jets, as fitting in their weapons bays allows them to carry more missiles than ever before.

Peregrine, named after a falcon that preys on other birds, is medium-range air-to-air missile, it is just 6 feet long and weighs 150 pounds. The AMRAAM air-to-air missile, by contrast, is 12 feet long and weighs approximately 335 pounds. According to popularmechanics.com, Peregrine looks very similar to the SM-1/2/3/6 Standard series of naval surface-to-air missiles also manufactured by Raytheon.

The weapon would allow US Air Force fighter jets to double or triple their munitions loads, sharply increasing the number of shots they could take in a single mission, as reported by airforcemag.com.

Peregrine “combines the range and the autonomy of the AMRAAM with the maneuverability characteristics of the AIM-9X” with extreme maneuverability as it approaches its target. The weapon will cost “significantly less” to buy and maintain than the AIM-120 or AIM-9X, and is faster to develop.

The missile uses a “multimode autonomous seeker,” which could include both infrared and radar sensors to guide the missile to target. The missile is equipped with a blast fragmentation warhead to down enemy aircraft.

The system has a “new, high-performance propulsion section” that gives it half the size of AMRAAM a slightly better range. The missile is described as having very good maneuverability in the “endgame” stage, giving it the ability to chase down aircraft trying to evade it in the moments before intercept.

How many Peregrines can an aircraft like the F-35 carry? It’s not clear, but it’s possible that if Peregrine is half as long as AMRRAM, an F-35 could carry twice as many of them. That would mean each F-35 could carry eight missiles — and even more missiles on external hardpoints if mission planners were willing to trade stealth away.

It’s even possible that the US Air Force could team an F-35 carrying Peregrines internally with an F-35 carrying the missiles both internally and externally, with the former jet quietly spotting targets for the latter. 

The trend is clearly toward longer-range missiles that take advantage of a web of battlefield sensors and data sharing to shoot down adversaries first.