Red Hebe

Red Hebe was a large British air-to-air missile with active radar homing, developed by Vickers for the Royal Air Force interceptor aircraft planned under Operational Requirement F.155. It grew out of the earlier Red Dean, whose materials could not survive the skin heating of sustained supersonic flight, so Vickers proposed a stainless steel airframe instead. The missile weighed about 600 kilograms, was just over five and a half metres long, about 380 millimetres across and carried a warhead of roughly 68 kilograms, large to offset the poor accuracy of a small seeker antenna. Critics compared it unfavourably with the American Sparrow and Sidewinder. It never advanced much beyond advanced design studies. When the 1957 Defence White Paper cancelled F.155, the missile had no aircraft to carry it and was cancelled too.