Velvet Glove missile

Velvet Glove
Type	Air-to-air missile
Place of origin	Canada
Service history
In service	Air Force
Used by	Royal Canadian Air Force (Testing only)
Production history
Designed	1948-1951
Manufacturer	Canadair
Produced	1952 (Limited production for testing)

The Velvet Glove was a short-range semi-active radar homing air-to-air missile designed by CARDE (today DRDC Valcartier) and produced by Canadair starting in 1953. 131 Velvet Gloves had been completed when the program was terminated in 1956, officially because of concerns about its ability to be launched at supersonic speeds from the Avro Arrow then under design, but also from the design being overtaken by developments in the United States.

Small scale work on what would become the Velvet Glove started in 1948 at CARDE, and by 1951 the plans were advanced enough to put forth the design as armament on the Avro CF-100 Canuck fighter that was then entering service with the RCAF. Canadair was selected as the manufacturer, and Westinghouse was commissioned to build the radar guidance unit. The final missile design was about ten feet long and just under a foot in diameter. It used four fins at the tail for steering, and was guided by a semi-active radar located behind a conical nose cone. Westinghouse's microwave radar proximity fuze fired the 60 pound (27 kg) warhead.

To test the aerodynamics of the missile, instead of building an expensive supersonic wind tunnel CARDE used a method developed by Gerald Bull and others of firing sabot-equipped test models down a specially-constructed 1,000 yard range. The models were fired through a series of stations located at 100-yard intervals, each equipped with a metal-coated "jump card". The position and shape of the resulting holes in the cards indicated whether or not the missile was flying stably. The metallic coating on the cards triggered a timer, to measure velocity. One of the stations was also equipped for Schlieren photography, to make a permanent record of shock waves around the model. To reconcile conflicting needs for high pressure to burn the propellant efficiently, and lower pressure to accelerate the model and sabot without destroying them, the gun used a High–low system chamber. A drilled plate limited the rate at which the propellant gases reached the round. This basic design would be key to Project HARP and many of Bull's later concepts.

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