Hellfire Effectiveness
Thread Starter
Joined: Dec 2010
Posts: 165
Likes: 4
From: Suffolk
Hellfire Effectiveness
In October last year a Reaper drone fired a Hellfire missile at a fast moving object over the sea off the coast of Yemen and it seemed to bounce off it; it certainly failed to destroy the target or even alter its course. Is the Hellfire really as ineffective as that?
Joined: Aug 2009
Aviation Qualifications: Military
Posts: 9,346
Likes: 2,187
From: Texas
I saw your post in Jet Blast. Chasing UFO's hardly seems to be a military problem. What I gleaned from the youtube you shared is that its political stuff.
Using the Hellfire as an air to air weapon is an interesting wrinkle on that munition.
I know a little bit about Hellfire (albeit my experiences are a few decades old.)
It's an anti-tank weapon, meant (optimized) for air-to-ground attacks. In the US Navy, they modified the SH-60B (and now MH-60R) to carry and deploy the Hellfire as a lower cost anti boat/anti small ship weapon. It's original purpose was tank busting. The speed of the thing you had on the video in JB was quite a bit more than a boat or a tank. That might inform the difficulty in using Hellfire as an air to air weapon.
To make it an more effective air-to-air weapon, there would need to be a mod to the warhead so that something like a proximity fuse + HE/Blast Frag warhead is used rather than the anti-Tank / Anti-Boat warhead.
Granted, our Army and Navy have had a number of years to test out various mods to this Laser guided anti surface missile. I am not privy to any recent developments. (And there quite a few different mods to the missile).
When I was in the Middle East, Reaper had only recently come on line, but the Predator used the Laser guided Hellfires to very good effect on a wide variety of ground targets. At the time, we didn't have any TTP (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures) for using Hellfire in an Air-to-Air mode.
There was apparently a development for a ground-to-air mode.
Suggest you head over to the Wikipedia page for the AGM 114, it's a great treatment for that munition.
Using the Hellfire as an air to air weapon is an interesting wrinkle on that munition.
I know a little bit about Hellfire (albeit my experiences are a few decades old.)
It's an anti-tank weapon, meant (optimized) for air-to-ground attacks. In the US Navy, they modified the SH-60B (and now MH-60R) to carry and deploy the Hellfire as a lower cost anti boat/anti small ship weapon. It's original purpose was tank busting. The speed of the thing you had on the video in JB was quite a bit more than a boat or a tank. That might inform the difficulty in using Hellfire as an air to air weapon.
To make it an more effective air-to-air weapon, there would need to be a mod to the warhead so that something like a proximity fuse + HE/Blast Frag warhead is used rather than the anti-Tank / Anti-Boat warhead.
Granted, our Army and Navy have had a number of years to test out various mods to this Laser guided anti surface missile. I am not privy to any recent developments. (And there quite a few different mods to the missile).
When I was in the Middle East, Reaper had only recently come on line, but the Predator used the Laser guided Hellfires to very good effect on a wide variety of ground targets. At the time, we didn't have any TTP (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures) for using Hellfire in an Air-to-Air mode.
There was apparently a development for a ground-to-air mode.
It has also been fielded on surface platforms in the surface-to-surface and surface-to-air roles. Interesting article about that here
Last edited by Lonewolf_50; 10th September 2025 at 20:00.
Joined: Apr 2020
Posts: 1,983
Likes: 381
From: Hampshire
Could have been a failed test of a technology demonstrator weapon?
From TWZ Article AGM-114 Hellfire Missile Getting Articulated Warhead Capable Of Blasting In Different Directions
From TWZ Article AGM-114 Hellfire Missile Getting Articulated Warhead Capable Of Blasting In Different Directions
It’s also interesting to note here that the U.S. Air Force has been testing heavily modified AGM-114s with entirely new, fully articulating nose sections as part of its Missile Utility Transformation via Articulated Nose Technology (MUTANT) project. MUTANT has been exploring whether this technology could help improve the probability of a missile scoring a kill against an aerial target. The Air Force has stressed that Hellfire is currently being used mostly because it is a readily available design, and that it is not necessarily a direct path to an operational munition. Whether there has been any interest in exploring how the MUTANT technology could apply in an air-to-ground context is unknown.
Joined: Aug 2009
Aviation Qualifications: Military
Posts: 9,346
Likes: 2,187
From: Texas
Could have been a failed test of a technology demonstrator weapon?
From TWZ Article AGM-114 Hellfire Missile Getting Articulated Warhead Capable Of Blasting In Different Directions
From TWZ Article AGM-114 Hellfire Missile Getting Articulated Warhead Capable Of Blasting In Different Directions
Good reading on the MUTANT project.
Joined: Mar 2008
Aviation Qualifications: Spotter
Posts: 1,817
Likes: 220
From: London
Video included in this clip. Is certainly a peculiar one.
Go and view the video in jet blast. It brings with it a load of political bollocks about UFOs that this sub forum can do without.
UFOs again...
Suggest you read Justin Heywood's commentary in the follow-on post.
T28B
Go and view the video in jet blast. It brings with it a load of political bollocks about UFOs that this sub forum can do without.
UFOs again...
Suggest you read Justin Heywood's commentary in the follow-on post.
T28B
Joined: Oct 2019
Aviation Qualifications: Non-Aircrew
Posts: 1,705
Likes: 1,085
From: USA
One cause for the apparent speed is parallax. If the target is far closer to the camera platform than to the ocean below, the effect is multiplying the camera platform speed by the ratio of the distances. What is not shown is the view from the other camera platform as the relative speed would be minimized and therefore the footage uninteresting. Note that the missile shares the same tremendous speed, but at 90º to the flight path.
Were I to guess, the target was a balloon of some type and the impact was insufficient to trigger the warhead - like shooting a rifle at a bubble bath. Maybe it carried a radiosonde that was in an insulated container and provided a radar return.
[edit] Isn't a hellfire a laser designated missile? Many polymers, particularly thin ones, are transparent to near IR, a popular wavelength for battlefield lasers, so a balloon envelope would not be detected, though the payload could be. OTOH, some Hellfire variants have on-board mm-wavelength radar for target tracking and terminal guidance.[end edit]
It should be easy to see what a range finder measured as distance to observed target, what the altitude the camera platform was operating at, what the slant angle was to the target, what the relative bearing from the camera platform path to the target was, and how fast the camera platform was moving. Some of this information appears to have been cropped out from the presentation.
The inexplicable parts of this encounter are why only one view is shown when two camera platform vehicles were involved, why critical data is not presented, and why it made it this far with that information missing. Is there a pro-UFO lobby expecting visitors from other planets, ones who are capable of crossing light-years of space in reasonable amounts of time, but are so shy they only get captured on cameras following the invention of cameras, but went without notice until then?
Were I to guess, the target was a balloon of some type and the impact was insufficient to trigger the warhead - like shooting a rifle at a bubble bath. Maybe it carried a radiosonde that was in an insulated container and provided a radar return.
[edit] Isn't a hellfire a laser designated missile? Many polymers, particularly thin ones, are transparent to near IR, a popular wavelength for battlefield lasers, so a balloon envelope would not be detected, though the payload could be. OTOH, some Hellfire variants have on-board mm-wavelength radar for target tracking and terminal guidance.[end edit]
It should be easy to see what a range finder measured as distance to observed target, what the altitude the camera platform was operating at, what the slant angle was to the target, what the relative bearing from the camera platform path to the target was, and how fast the camera platform was moving. Some of this information appears to have been cropped out from the presentation.
The inexplicable parts of this encounter are why only one view is shown when two camera platform vehicles were involved, why critical data is not presented, and why it made it this far with that information missing. Is there a pro-UFO lobby expecting visitors from other planets, ones who are capable of crossing light-years of space in reasonable amounts of time, but are so shy they only get captured on cameras following the invention of cameras, but went without notice until then?
Last edited by MechEngr; 11th September 2025 at 12:55.
