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Despite their obvious differences, Sidewinders and Sparrows often went together because they aren’t just the names of flying creatures and slithering serpents… they are weapons of war.
The Sidewinder
House Sparrows
The Rapier missile system
Chinese Fire Arrows
The Tipu Sultan’s artillery rockets
The RS-28 rockets fired by the Polikarpov I-16
The German R4M unguided air to air rocket
The nuclear AIR-2 Genie missile
A Genie launch
The AIM9 Sidewinder
The rotating reticule
The rolleron
Guidance
The warhead
An AIM 9 warhead effect demonstration
The AIM7 Sparrow
A QF4B killed by a Sparrow missile
Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to images in the Public Domain, UK Defence Imagery, Wubei Zhi, NASA, Juergen Schiffmann, the USAF, David Monniaux, RoyKabanlit, U.S. Navy National Museum of Naval Aviation and the USN.
