BAe Sea Eagle

The BAe Sea Eagle is a British medium-weight, sea-skimming anti-ship missile designed and built by BAe Dynamics, a business that is now part of MBDA. It was meant to sink or disable ships as large as aircraft carriers despite jamming, decoys and other countermeasures, and it was carried by aircraft rather than fired from ships. It grew out of the Martel family: studies between 1973 and 1975 judged the television-guided Martel uncompetitive and called for a longer-ranged jet-powered replacement, set out as Air Staff Target 1226 for the Royal Air Force and Naval Staff Target 6451 for the Royal Navy. Hawker Siddeley proposed an enlarged Martel airframe with a Marconi radar seeker, design of the P3T began in 1976, full-scale development began in 1979, production started in 1982 and the missile entered service in 1985. The Royal Air Force Buccaneer was the first carrier, followed by the Sea Harrier and the Tornado GR1B, and the Royal Saudi Air Force and the Indian Navy also used it. A ship-launched variant, the Sea Eagle SL, lost a 1984 Royal Navy competition to Harpoon. The missile is powered by a licence-built Microturbo TRI 60 turbojet and flies at about Mach 0.85 over a range of more than 110 kilometres, guided by an autopilot and a J-band active radar seeker. It was withdrawn from Royal Air Force and Royal Navy service by 2000.