Well, title says it all. Do heat-seeking missiles (in-fact any missiles) have any mechanism that is supposed to prevent them from targeting friendly planes (or civilian ones)?
I’m talking about missiles themselves, not targeting systems on a plane that shoots them.
I mean missile have to chase target after it leaves a plane that shot it - but what if friendly plane flies into its path? Will it be able to recognize it? And not shoot it down?
*I meant hitting int the title, too late to edit now…
I suspect they focus on the unique heat signature of their target - i.e., a MiG-29’s engine as opposed to an F-16’s.
The general answer is that they do not. A heat seeking weapon, like a Sidewinder or Stinger, locks on to whatever target it is aimed at and attempts to destroy it.
There is nothing stopping an F-15 pilot from firing a Sidewinder at a friendly target if he is really determined to do so or astonishingly incompetent. A fighter pilot will generally try NOT to fire the weapon with a friendly target in the way, but if so it’s worth noting the weapon system is designed to lock onto a specific heat signature designated by the launcher’s targeting system and pursue that, not just go chasing after whatever heat source it wants to.
As RickJay noted, generally no. There may be newer versions of IR missiles that can be that discriminatory, and with the massive increases in computing power and miniaturization I would assume so,but you probably aren’t going to know about them without some serious security clearance.
IR missiles are designed to avoid transferring lock if something else hot flies past the thing they’re locked onto. That’s how they try to outsmart the target dropping flares or other decoys.
In the early days a standard defense to an incoming IR missile was to maneuver to put the Sun or even a bright shiny cloud as your background as seen by the missile. With decent luck the missile would choose to follow the hotter sun or larger cloud & you’d be safe.
Modern missiles don’t fall for those tricks. So they’re also unlikely to transfer lock to some other aircraft that happens to blunder into the missile’s line of sight to the locked-on target.
Something else to consider: the time of flight of most IR missiles is on the order of 30 seconds max. For more typical employment ranges we’d expect impact in 5 or 10 seconds.
There’s just not much time for somebody to blunder into the path. So there’s not much incentive to design in a feature to solve that non-problem.
Finally, they don’t know anything about one aircraft type or another. You can lock them onto a burning ground fire, or the Sun and launch. And they’ll do their best to hit that.
Or your wingman. It has happened a bunch in training with captive missiles & I have to assume it’s happened at least once in the real world.