"phil hunt" wrote
Peter Kemp wrote
The Meteor is still a few years from deployment though, but when it
arrives, it should handily outrange AMRAAM which is the longest
spear
in the IAF armoury (Derby is alleged to have a much shorter range).

Incidently, why is Israel naming this missile after an English city?

Why do you think that future American or Israeli made
missiles won't have those capabilities?

Because there are no current projects publicly announced that have
the
capabilities of the Meteor. Could there be one in development?
Maybe,
but there's no evidence for it.

IIRC a successor to the Phoenix was planned, but was scrapped in
the 1990s.

Yep, the USAF isn't convinced there's a real mission for AAMs with
that range.

It's going to be interesting watching Meteor's schedule slip to the
right. Here's why. Meteor's main claim to fame is very loooong range,
courtesy of rocket-ramjet propulsion. What comes with is a
built-from-scratch active AAM seeker. As anyone who's paid attention
knows, the reason AMRAAM took so long to enter service was the
difficulty in engineering that seeker to fit into a 7 inch airframe.
AMRAAM's seeker, with the best RADAR seeker designers in the world
working on it, took many more years to develop than planned. Since
I've seen nothing about special emphasis in Meteor development being
placed on risk reduction in the seeker, I expect a series of schedule
slips due to vague reasons that will push IOC out about ten years.