Apr 172011
A photo of the AGM-129 on display at the Strategic Air and Space Museum in Nebraska:
Two photos of the AGM-129 on display at the USAF Museum in Dayton, Ohio:
6 Responses to “AGM-129”
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A photo of the AGM-129 on display at the Strategic Air and Space Museum in Nebraska:
Two photos of the AGM-129 on display at the USAF Museum in Dayton, Ohio:
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Admin — Very cool. I’m surprised they would have one of these on display where you could take such detailed photos of it.
Now all you have to do is find some blueprints of this and put them up on your website for sale.
Not sure how good the AGM-129’s stealth characteristics are with the pivot wing and that fact you can see into its internal structure.
The stealth characteristics were probably pretty good. The wing unfolding system looks somewhat impossible; unlike wiht other folded-wing cruise missiles, there is no obvious place or the wings to go when folded. It looks like they just shoot straight out of the wing roots. However, upon closer examination, it looks like what happens is that the whole back-upp-shell of the airframe pops up an inche or so after release from the carrier aircraft. giving room for the wings to rotate out, then closes up again… thus giving aerodynamically clean and stealthy lines both before and after wing extension, with just a few seconds of “uncleanliness” in between.
As for blueprints: a few years ago what appears to have been a good, clean, detailed and official 3-view showed up on ebay. I hadn’t heard about it until just recently, and haven’t seen it anywhere else. I took just a whole lot of photos of the SASM AGM-129, including a bunch with a scale reference, specifically for the purpose of drafting my own detailed set of plans.
It’s a shame they got rid of it already. I wonder why they did that.
The retirement was due to the SORT/Moscow treaty. Total number of of nuclear warheads was limited to 2,200, and the missile was seen as unreliable and a maintenance hog.
This missile had problems during development; early ones dropped out of an aircraft’s bomb bay tended to go complelety out of control.
Once they got that fixed, there were bad quality control problems associated with its manufacture, which was done by three different companies: General Dynamics, Hughes Aircraft. and Raytheon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-129_ACM
It obviously flew at a very low altitude, considering that in flew into a couple of unoccupied trailers during a test in 1997. That suggests a cruising altitude of what? 10-15 feet?
I think the two white rectangles on the missile’s bottom might be antennas for a terrain following radar system, with the dot ahead of the back one being a laser emitter/sensor for the same purpose.
People who have seen Tomahawks in flight at night mention that dim red flashes are intermittently emitted from the missile’s bottoms as they cruise at low altitude.
It’s kind of surprising that the antenna covers would be rectangular in shape; I would have expected diamond shapes for stealth.
See the NACA duct intake on the bottom to keep the radar from seeing the front of the turbofan engine? That idea goes clean back to the 1950’s Matador and Mace cruise missiles:
http://www.mace-b.com/38TMW/Missiles/images/plenum.jpg