{"id":24261942,"date":"2026-09-23T15:21:02","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T13:21:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/sidewinder-missile-china-lake-william-mclean-development\/"},"modified":"2026-09-23T15:21:36","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T13:21:36","slug":"sidewinder-missile-china-lake-william-mclean-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/es\/sidewinder-missile-china-lake-william-mclean-development\/","title":{"rendered":"The Sidewinder Was a Bootleg Project Nobody Authorised"},"content":{"rendered":"<style>.et_pb_title_container h1.entry-title { padding-top: 40px !important; }<\/style>\r\n\r\n<p>There was never supposed to be a Sidewinder. The Navy did not ask for one and the Air Force did not want one.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>It exists because a physicist at a desert laboratory in California decided the official requirements were wrong, worked on it out of the wrong budget under a deliberately misleading project name, and kept going after being told to stop.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>Seventy years later it is still the air-to-air missile everybody buys.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n<div style=\"background:#f4f6f8;border-left:4px solid #5C91FF;padding:18px 22px;margin:26px 0\"><p style=\"margin:0 0 10px;font-weight:700;font-size:17px;color:#0d1117\">Quick Facts<\/p><table style=\"width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;font-size:15px;line-height:1.6\"><tr><td style=\"padding:4px 12px 4px 0;color:#555;vertical-align:top;white-space:nowrap\"><strong>Inventor<\/strong><\/td><td style=\"padding:4px 0;color:#222\">William Burdette McLean (1914\u20131976), Caltech physics doctorate, 1939<\/td><\/tr><tr><td style=\"padding:4px 12px 4px 0;color:#555;vertical-align:top;white-space:nowrap\"><strong>Where<\/strong><\/td><td style=\"padding:4px 0;color:#222\">Naval Ordnance Test Station, China Lake, in the Mojave Desert<\/td><\/tr><tr><td style=\"padding:4px 12px 4px 0;color:#555;vertical-align:top;white-space:nowrap\"><strong>Started<\/strong><\/td><td style=\"padding:4px 0;color:#222\">1946\u201347, with no requirement and no programme<\/td><\/tr><tr><td style=\"padding:4px 12px 4px 0;color:#555;vertical-align:top;white-space:nowrap\"><strong>Disguised as<\/strong><\/td><td style=\"padding:4px 0;color:#222\">\u201cLocal Fuze Project 602\u201d, later \u201cFeasibility Study 567\u201d<\/td><\/tr><tr><td style=\"padding:4px 12px 4px 0;color:#555;vertical-align:top;white-space:nowrap\"><strong>Made official<\/strong><\/td><td style=\"padding:4px 0;color:#222\">1951, when Adm. William S. Parsons visited and released three million dollars<\/td><\/tr><tr><td style=\"padding:4px 12px 4px 0;color:#555;vertical-align:top;white-space:nowrap\"><strong>Complexity<\/strong><\/td><td style=\"padding:4px 0;color:#222\">Seven vacuum tubes and about two dozen moving parts<\/td><\/tr><tr><td style=\"padding:4px 12px 4px 0;color:#555;vertical-align:top;white-space:nowrap\"><strong>Named by<\/strong><\/td><td style=\"padding:4px 0;color:#222\">Gilbert Plain, after the snake that hunts by body heat<\/td><\/tr><tr><td style=\"padding:4px 12px 4px 0;color:#555;vertical-align:top;white-space:nowrap\"><strong>First test pilot<\/strong><\/td><td style=\"padding:4px 0;color:#222\">Lt. Walter A. \u201cWally\u201d Schirra, later a Mercury astronaut<\/td><\/tr><tr><td style=\"padding:4px 12px 4px 0;color:#555;vertical-align:top;white-space:nowrap\"><strong>Fleet release<\/strong><\/td><td style=\"padding:4px 0;color:#222\">First working day of 1956<\/td><\/tr><tr><td style=\"padding:4px 12px 4px 0;color:#555;vertical-align:top;white-space:nowrap\"><strong>First combat use<\/strong><\/td><td style=\"padding:4px 0;color:#222\">24 September 1958, over the Taiwan Strait<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">The man<\/h2>\r\n\r\n<p>William Burdette McLean was born in 1914, the son of a Protestant clergyman who believed in self-reliance. His mother taught him to knit, crochet and use a sewing machine before he started school. As a boy he built surfboards, canoes, rafts and his own photographic enlarger, and at eleven he helped his family build a house.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>He was good at science and maths and bad at English and history, which got him into Caltech, where he took three degrees in physics and a doctorate in 1939. One of his professors observed that McLean sometimes seemed more interested in the laboratory equipment than in the measurements it produced.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>The war put him at the National Bureau of Standards designing arming devices for proximity fuzes \u2014 objects that must work at the target and at no other moment. Jacob Rabinow, who worked under him there and went on to hold 225 patents, called him the best engineer he had ever known.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>At the end of the war McLean went out to the Naval Ordnance Test Station at China Lake for what he expected to be a two-month visit. He stayed twenty-three years.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\" style=\"margin:0 0 24px;width:100%\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"skip-lazy\" data-no-lazy=\"1\" loading=\"eager\" width=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2026\/09\/naval-ordnance-test-station-china-lake-1955-michelson-laboratory.jpg\" alt=\"The US Naval Ordnance Test Station at China Lake in the mid-1950s\" style=\"width:100%;height:auto;max-width:100%;display:block\"><figcaption style=\"font-size:13px;color:#777;text-align:center;margin-top:6px;font-style:italic\">China Lake in the mid-1950s: Michelson Laboratory, a car park full of 1940s sedans, and 150 miles of Mojave between it and Los Angeles. Photo: US Navy<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">The argument nobody wanted<\/h2>\r\n\r\n<p>In 1946, running the station\u2019s Aviation Ordnance Division, McLean was working on aiming systems for unguided air-to-air rockets. He worked out that no aiming system, however perfect, could let an unguided rocket hit a target that was free to accelerate unpredictably. The weapon would have to steer itself.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>Radar sets of the period were far too bulky for the nose of a rocket. Infrared detectors were about the size of a dime.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>The rest of the guided-missile community had reached the opposite conclusion, because infrared cannot see through cloud, and both services had written requirements for all-weather missiles. McLean had come to distrust requirements at the Bureau of Standards; he thought they often asked for the impossible and sometimes failed to ask for what was feasible. His view was that a requirement should be written after the thing existed.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>He also knew that bombers attack from above twenty thousand feet, where cloud is scarce, and that a weapon working nine times out of ten beats one too complicated to work and too expensive to buy.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n<div style=\"position:relative;padding-bottom:56.25%;height:0;overflow:hidden;margin:24px 0\"><iframe class=\"skip-lazy\" data-no-lazy=\"1\" loading=\"eager\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/OY1nRMQ0m18\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;border:0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">Local Fuze Project 602<\/h2>\r\n\r\n<p>In 1949 McLean proposed a \u201cheat-homing rocket\u201d. The last word was the argument: an aircraft is maintained continuously for repeated use, whereas ordnance is stored and then fired. If the missile was ordnance, it had to be simple and sturdy, and McLean thought it should cost a few hundred dollars when everyone else assumed hundreds of thousands.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>There was no requirement, so there was no money. For two years he ran the work on the station\u2019s internal discretionary funds plus Navy fuze money, under the name Local Fuze Project 602 \u2014 the rationale being that the seeker head was, if you squinted, a fuze that got the missile closer before it went off. Later it became Feasibility Study 567, which was, as Howard Wilcox put it, another obfuscation.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>Meanwhile the Bureau of Aeronautics was building the Sparrow and letting it be known that all guided missiles should be its business. McLean recruited volunteers from around the station instead.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n<div style=\"background:#f8f9fa;border-left:4px solid #5C91FF;padding:20px 22px;margin:18px 0 24px;font-size:16px;line-height:1.7;display:flex;gap:20px;align-items:flex-start\"><div><em>&ldquo;You could do anything you were big enough to do.&rdquo;<\/em><div style=\"margin-top:10px;font-size:14px;color:#555\"><strong>A China Lake physicist<\/strong> &mdash; On working for McLean, quoted in Invention &amp; Technology<\/div><\/div><\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">The design decisions that made it<\/h2>\r\n\r\n<p>McLean believed that with a good enough steering servo you could fly a barn door, so the first missile had rectangular wings and fins. They flew reasonably well. His aerodynamicist eventually won that argument and the production version got swept leading edges.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>A technician named Sidney Crockett solved the roll problem with rollerons: solid gyroscope wheels on flaps at the rear fin tips, rims notched so the airstream spins them, so that any roll forces the flaps out into the airflow to oppose it. No electronics, no power, no commands. Just a spinning wheel that does not want to be turned.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>The torque-balance servo commanded a twisting force on the fin rather than an angle, which automatically compensated for changes in speed and altitude. The team\u2019s boast was that their missile was independent of aerodynamics.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\" style=\"margin:0 0 24px;width:100%\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"skip-lazy\" data-no-lazy=\"1\" loading=\"eager\" width=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2026\/09\/aim-9b-sidewinder-seeker-head-infrared-nose.jpg\" alt=\"The infrared seeker head of an early AIM-9B Sidewinder\" style=\"width:100%;height:auto;max-width:100%;display:block\"><figcaption style=\"font-size:13px;color:#777;text-align:center;margin-top:6px;font-style:italic\">The seeker head. Five competing designs were developed in parallel, labelled A to E; the A seeker won because its gyroscope worked independently of the missile\u2019s roll. Photo: Wikimedia Commons<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<div style=\"background:#f8f9fa;border-left:4px solid #5C91FF;padding:20px 22px;margin:18px 0 24px;font-size:16px;line-height:1.7;display:flex;gap:20px;align-items:flex-start\"><div><em>&ldquo;Even though the functions the missile performed were complex, its hardware \u2014 seven vacuum tubes and about two dozen moving parts \u2014 made it about as complicated as a portable radio combined with a washing machine.&rdquo;<\/em><div style=\"margin-top:10px;font-size:14px;color:#555\"><strong>Howard A. Wilcox<\/strong> &mdash; Sidewinder design team member and later project head, writing in Invention &amp; Technology, 1989<\/div><\/div><\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n<p>The telemetry was built from Heathkits, because laboratory-grade equipment was expensive and fragile. An engineer taught a group of women at the station to assemble the kits; once they were good at that, he had them build seeker heads.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">The cigarette trick<\/h2>\r\n\r\n<p>Officials from Washington kept arriving to see whether any of this was real. The team developed a demonstration: mount a seeker head on the antenna of a surplus radar van, wire the seeker\u2019s output to steer the antenna, and let visitors watch the whole assembly track an aircraft overhead \u2014 or a man standing at a distance holding a lit cigarette.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>In 1951 Rear Admiral William S. \u201cDeak\u201d Parsons, deputy chief of the Bureau of Ordnance, came to look.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n<div style=\"background:#f8f9fa;border-left:4px solid #1565c0;padding:20px 22px;margin:18px 0 24px;font-size:16px;line-height:1.7;display:flex;gap:20px;align-items:flex-start\"><div><em>&ldquo;We will pursue this weapon system.&rdquo;<\/em><div style=\"margin-top:10px;font-size:14px;color:#555\"><strong>Adm. William S. \u201cDeak\u201d Parsons<\/strong> &mdash; Deputy chief of the Bureau of Ordnance, at China Lake in 1951<\/div><\/div><\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n<p>He also decreed that the project would be run from China Lake rather than from Washington. Three million dollars followed. The missile already had a name, suggested by McLean\u2019s colleague Gilbert Plain after the rattlesnake that hunts by body heat.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n<div style=\"position:relative;padding-bottom:56.25%;height:0;overflow:hidden;margin:24px 0\"><iframe class=\"skip-lazy\" data-no-lazy=\"1\" loading=\"eager\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/jWkMS7msV5Y\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;border:0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">Six inches<\/h2>\r\n\r\n<p>By 1953 more than two hundred people at the station were on the project and more than a dozen shots had failed. On 11 September a carefully prepared round passed within six inches of a drone, and Wilcox wired Washington calling it a virtual hit. McLean threw a beer party. At two in the morning somebody telephoned a former commanding officer with the news, could not make himself understood, and was asked to put on someone sensible \u2014 who turned out to be up on the roof.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>The first test pilot on the programme was a young Navy lieutenant named Walter Schirra, who later went to space.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">Holloman, 1955<\/h2>\r\n\r\n<p>The Air Force did not know the Sidewinder existed until McLean and Wilcox ambushed an assistant secretary over breakfast in Pasadena. He agreed to commission a study, told them what conclusion it would reach, and required a shoot-off against the Air Force\u2019s own Falcon.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>The visiting team readied four rounds in four hours and left them on the aircraft overnight, which with a Falcon would have been unthinkable. They asked for a flashlight and a small multimeter. They were then shown the Falcon test rig: dials, gauges and meters along forty feet of wall, with the missiles trolleyed past on a series of stations.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>The first Sidewinder flew up the drone\u2019s exhaust pipe and blew it apart without a warhead. The pilot celebrated with a victory roll that broke the sound barrier and was formally cautioned for it.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n<div style=\"position:relative;padding-bottom:56.25%;height:0;overflow:hidden;margin:24px 0\"><iframe class=\"skip-lazy\" data-no-lazy=\"1\" loading=\"eager\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/_Uwk4eiJ07o\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;border:0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">And afterwards<\/h2>\r\n\r\n<p>The Sidewinder was released to the fleet on the first working day of 1956, and two years later Chinese Nationalist Sabres used it over the Taiwan Strait in the first successful air-to-air missile engagement in history \u2014 a story with its own sting in the tail, since one round lodged in a MiG without exploding and gave the Soviet Union a complete design to copy.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>McLean stopped running the project in 1954 when he became technical director. He went on to satellites, then submersibles, and found that the further he got from missiles the less anyone wanted to hear from him. Shortly before he died in 1976 he complained that innovation had been easier in the old days at China Lake.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>Several hundred thousand Sidewinders and foreign copies have been built \u2014 more than any other air-to-air missile. It remains the cheapest one America makes.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p><em>Sources: Howard A. Wilcox and Ron Westrum, \u201cSidewinder\u201d, Invention &amp; Technology, Fall 1989; Ron Westrum, Sidewinder: Creative Missile Development at China Lake; National Academy of Sciences biographical memoir of William B. McLean; Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake.<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n<style>.mfq{margin:34px 0 8px}.mfq h2{font:26px\/1.3 \"Gilroy semiBold\",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;color:#0d1117;padding-top:22px;margin:0 0 6px}.mfq .qa details{border-top:1px solid #5C91FF;margin:0;padding:0}.mfq .qa details:last-of-type{border-bottom:1px solid #e2e7ee}.mfq .qa summary{cursor:pointer;list-style:none;display:flex;justify-content:space-between;align-items:center;gap:16px;padding:22px 26px;font:18px\/1.7 \"Gilroy semiBold\",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;color:#0d1117}.mfq .qa summary::-webkit-details-marker{display:none}.mfq .qa summary::after{content:\"+\";font:24px Helvetica,sans-serif;color:#3568e0;flex:0 0 auto}.mfq .qa details[open] summary::after{content:\"\\2013\"}.mfq .qa details:hover summary{color:#3568e0}.mfq .qa .a{font:16px\/1.7 \"Gilroy regular\",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;color:#454e5e;padding:0 26px 24px}.mfq .qa .a a{color:#3568e0}@media(max-width:680px){.mfq .qa summary{padding:18px 14px;font-size:17px}.mfq .qa .a{padding:0 14px 20px}}<\/style>\r\n\r\n\r\n<section class=\"mfq\"><h2>Frequently Asked Questions<\/h2><div class=\"qa\"><details open><summary>Who invented the Sidewinder missile?<\/summary><div class=\"a\">William B. McLean, a Navy physicist at the Naval Ordnance Test Station at China Lake in California. He conceived the heat-homing rocket in the late 1940s and led its development until 1954, when he became the station\u2019s technical director and handed the project to Howard Wilcox.<\/div><\/details><details><summary>Was the Sidewinder an official programme?<\/summary><div class=\"a\">Not at first. There was no Navy requirement for an infrared missile, so McLean funded early work from internal discretionary money and Navy fuze budgets, disguising the effort as Local Fuze Project 602 and later as Feasibility Study 567.<\/div><\/details><details><summary>Why did nobody want an infrared missile?<\/summary><div class=\"a\">Because infrared does not see through cloud, and both the Navy and the Air Force had written requirements for all-weather missiles. McLean argued that almost no combat missions were flown through cloud anyway, and that a simple weapon working most of the time beat a complex one that rarely worked at all.<\/div><\/details><details><summary>How simple was the Sidewinder?<\/summary><div class=\"a\">Seven vacuum tubes and around two dozen moving parts, which one of its designers compared to a portable radio combined with a washing machine. Two sailors could eventually assemble one a minute, and the field test kit at its Air Force evaluation was a flashlight and a multimeter.<\/div><\/details><details><summary>What is a rolleron?<\/summary><div class=\"a\">A small gyroscope wheel mounted on a flap at the tip of each rear fin, with notches cut into its rim so the airstream spins it. If the missile starts to roll, the spinning wheels force the flaps out into the airflow to oppose it. A China Lake technician, Sidney Crockett, suggested them.<\/div><\/details><details><summary>Where does the name Sidewinder come from?<\/summary><div class=\"a\">From the sidewinder rattlesnake, which finds prey by sensing body heat. The name was suggested by McLean\u2019s colleague Gilbert Plain, and stuck before the project was even officially funded.<\/div><\/details><details><summary>How did the Sidewinder beat the Falcon?<\/summary><div class=\"a\">At a 1955 shoot-off at Holloman Air Force Base. Sidewinders were prepared in four hours and left on the aircraft overnight; the team asked only for a flashlight and a multimeter. The first round flew up the target drone\u2019s exhaust pipe and destroyed it without a warhead.<\/div><\/details><details><summary>When did the Sidewinder first score a kill?<\/summary><div class=\"a\">On 24 September 1958 over the Taiwan Strait, when Chinese Nationalist Sabres used AIM-9Bs against Communist MiGs. It was the first successful use of air-to-air missiles in combat, and one unexploded round handed the Soviet Union a complete design to copy.<\/div><\/details><\/div><\/section>\r\n\r\n\r\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@type\":\"FAQPage\",\"mainEntity\":[{\"@type\":\"Question\",\"name\":\"Who invented the Sidewinder missile?\",\"acceptedAnswer\":{\"@type\":\"Answer\",\"text\":\"William B. McLean, a Navy physicist at the Naval Ordnance Test Station at China Lake in California. He conceived the heat-homing rocket in the late 1940s and led its development until 1954, when he became the station\u2019s technical director and handed the project to Howard Wilcox.\"}},{\"@type\":\"Question\",\"name\":\"Was the Sidewinder an official programme?\",\"acceptedAnswer\":{\"@type\":\"Answer\",\"text\":\"Not at first. 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It was the first successful use of air-to-air missiles in combat, and one unexploded round handed the Soviet Union a complete design to copy.\"}}]}<\/script><div style=\"background:#f0f4ff;border-left:4px solid #5C91FF;padding:16px 20px;margin:32px 0 8px\"><p style=\"margin:0 0 8px;font-weight:600;color:#333\">Related Posts<\/p><p style=\"margin:4px 0\"><a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/taiwan-strait-1958-sidewinder-first-missile-kill-k-13-atoll\/\">How a Dud Sidewinder Armed the Soviets<\/a><\/p><p style=\"margin:4px 0\"><a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/how-heat-seeking-missile-infrared-seeker-works\/\">How a Heat-Seeking Missile Works, and Why Flares Stopped Saving You<\/a><\/p><p style=\"margin:4px 0\"><a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/gau-8-avenger-cannon-a-10-warthog-explained\/\">The GAU-8 Avenger: The Cannon They Built a Plane Around<\/a><\/p><\/div>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>No requirement, no budget, a deliberately misleading project name and a cigarette used as a target. How the most successful air-to-air missile ever built got made anyway.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":24261478,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"editor_notices":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[666,664],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24261942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history-and-legends","category-military-aviation"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Sidewinder Missile Development: The Bootleg Project | MiGFlug<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"No requirement, no budget and a fake project name. 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