La mattina del 24 settembre 1958, un volo di nazionalisti cinesi F-86 Sabres stava salendo sopra lo Stretto di Taiwan quando una formazione di comunisti MiG-17 slid past — a little higher and, on paper, the better aircraft. Then the Sabres did something no fighter had ever done in anger. They fired missiles.

Sciando fumo bianco, i piccoli missili a ricerca di calore inseguirono i MiG durante le loro virate e detonarono. Nel giro di pochi minuti il mondo assistette alle prime vittorie aeree con missili guidati, e il combattimento aereo cambiò per sempre. L'arma era l'americano AIM-9 Sidewinder, e il suo debutto sullo stretto avrebbe avuto una risonanza che nessuno, in nessuna delle due cabine di pilotaggio, avrebbe potuto immaginare.

Perché pochi giorni dopo, uno di quei Sidewinder si è infilzato in un MiG-17 senza andare — and handed the Soviet Union a free masterclass in missile design.

Un piccolo serpente a buon mercato con un occhio caldo

The Sidewinder was the pet project of William B. McLean, a physicist at the Navy’s China Lake test station in the California desert. While rival teams built big, complex, radar-guided missiles, McLean chased the opposite ideal: a weapon that homed on the heat of an enemy’s exhaust, with almost nothing to break. The result had barely two dozen moving parts and a gas generator instead of batteries. It was so simple that skeptics inside the Navy doubted it would even work.

Le prime uccisioni dell'era missilistica

When the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis flared in 1958, Washington rushed a few dozen Sidewinders to Taiwan and sent a US team to bolt them onto the ROCAF’s Sabres. The MiG-17 could out-climb the F-86, so the Nationalist pilots had spent months being bounced from above. The missile flipped the maths. On 24 September, the Sabres let the MiGs cruise past and then fired — and the heat-seekers ran them down. It was the first time in history a guided missile had killed an aircraft in combat.

Il proiettile difettoso che ha armato il nemico

Poi arrivò il colpo di scena, nessun piano di pianificazione bellica. Il 28 settembre, in un altro scontro, un Sidewinder si schiantò contro un MiG-17 e semplicemente non è esploso. The Chinese pilot nursed his jet home with a live American missile embedded in the airframe. Ground crews carefully extracted it — and once Moscow learned China had an intact Sidewinder, it pressed hard to get its hands on the prize.

What the Soviets received was, in effect, a finished blueprint. Their engineers copied the infrared seeker, the steering and the stabilisation and produced the Vympel K-13 — NATO codename AA-2 “Atoll” — which entered service around 1960. China built its own version as the PL-2. For decades, MiGs and their copies flew into battle carrying near-clones of the very missile once fired at them.

L'arma che non se n'è mai andata veramente

More than sixty years on, the Sidewinder still serves on the front line in its latest AIM-9X form, and its Soviet and Chinese offspring soldiered on for generations. Few weapons can claim to have opened an entire era of warfare on their first day in combat — and fewer still can claim to have armed both sides of the Cold War at once. It began with a handful of cheap, desert-built snakes fired over a narrow strip of contested water in 1958.

Fonti: Wikipedia (AIM-9 Sidewinder; missile K-13; seconda crisi dello Stretto di Taiwan); The War Zone (TWZ); National Air and Space Museum; resoconti dell'epoca. Il numero di aerei abbattuti durante la crisi del 1958 varia a seconda delle fonti ed è riportato così come riportato.