History
The Rb 05A was developed as an air-to-surface missile for the AJ 37 Viggen in the late 1960s. The supersonic speed was deemed necessary to reduce the threat of surface-to-air missiles. The missile would usually be launched after a high-speed attack run on very low altitude and climb to 400m for launch. The aircraft would immediately descend again and the pilot guiding the missile optically with a joystick.
Guidance commands are transmitted via a microwave transmission link. Tracking flares on the missile aid the pilot in guiding the missile on target.
It was later discovered that the missile was effective in air-to-air against non-maneuvering aircraft as well.
A TV-guided variant Rb 05B was proposed to the Swedish Air Force in the early 1970s, but was turned down in favor of the AGM-65 Maverick/Rb 75 instead.
Read more about this topic: Rb 05
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.”
—G.M. (George Macaulay)
“... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)