De Havilland Firestreak The de Havilland Firestreak is a British first - generation , passive infrared homing air - to - air missile . It was developed by de Havilland ( later Hawker Siddeley ) in the early 1950s and was the first such weapon to enter active service with the Royal Air Force and Fleet Air Arm , equipping the English Electric Lightning , de Havilland Sea Vixen and Gloster Javelin . It was a rear - aspect , fire and forget pursuit weapon , with a field of attack of 20 degrees either side of the target and was partially replaced in service by a developed variant , the Hawker Siddeley Red Top . Development . Firestreak was the result of a series of projects begun with the OR . 1056 Red Hawk missile . When this proved too ambitious for the then state of the art , a lower performance specification was released in 1951 as OR . 1117 , and given the Ministry of Supply rainbow code name Blue Jay . Blue Jay developed as a fairly conventional - looking missile with cropped delta wings mounted just rear of the midpoint and small rectangular control surfaces in tandem towards the rear . Internally , things were considerably more complex . The rear - mounted controls were operated by nose - mounted actuators via long pushrods . The actuators were powered by compressed air from bottles at the rear . The lead - tellurium ( PbTe ) IR seeker was mounted under an eight - faceted conical arsenic trisulphide " pencil " nose and was cooled to by anhydrous ammonia to improve the signal to noise ratio . The unusual faceted nose was chosen when a more conventional hemispherical nose proved prone to ice accretion . There were two rows of triangular windows in bands around the forward fuselage , behind which sat the optical proximity fuze s for the warhead . The warhead was at the rear of the missile , wrapped around the exhaust of the Magpie rocket . Service . The first airborne launch of Blue Jay took place in 1955 from a de Havilland Venom , the target drone - a Fairey Firefly - being destroyed . Blue Jay Mk . 1 entered service in 1957 with the RAF , where it was named Firestreak . Firestreak was deployed by the Royal Navy and the RAF in August 1958 ; it was the first effective British air - to - air missile . For launch , the missile seeker was slaved to the launch aircraft ' s radar ( Ferranti AIRPASS in the Lightning and GEC AI . 18 in the Sea Vixen ) until lock was achieved and the weapons was launched , leaving the interceptor free to acquire another target . A downside was that the missile was highly toxic ( probably due to the " Magpie " rocket motor ) and RAF armourers had to wear some form of CRBN protection to safely mount the missile onto an aircraft . " Unlike modern [ 1990s ] missiles , . . . Firestreak could only be fired outside cloud , and in winter , skies were rarely clear over the UK . " Improvements . Two Firestreak variants were studied but not adopted : the Mk . 2 with a new motor , and the Mk . 3 with increased wingspan and reduced top speed , for use with rocket - powered interceptors such as the Saunders - Roe SR . 177 and Avro 720 , according to Specification F . 124T . Firestreak was developed into Blue Jay Mk . 4 ( later renamed Blue Vesta ) , again intended for use by rocket - powered interceptors against high - speed Soviet bombers . In the end , Specification F . 124T was cancelled but Blue Jay Mk . 4 development continued . Blue Jay Mk . 4 ultimately entered service as the Red Top in 1964 . Despite Red Top being intended to replace Firestreak , Firestreak remained in limited service until the final retirement of the Lightning in 1988 ; the carriage of these missiles improved the aircraft ' s aerodynamics . Red Top was faster and had a longer range than Firestreak , and " was capable of all aspect homing against super - sonic targets . " An important difference between Firestreak and Red Top was the electronics technology used . Firestreak electronics used thermionic valve s , which were " wired in " to the control / guidance electronics and required a system of cooling pipes to remove the heat generated by the valve filaments . For this reason , the Firestreak missile on ground test was cooled by Arcton and in flight by ammonia pumped through the missile from the parent aircraft . The Red Top electronics were constructed using transistor s which were heated instead and the IR sensor in its dome - shaped Homing Head was cooled by purified air at filtered to 3 µm .