A fully mobile, armored, vehicle-mounted anti-aircraft missile system employing Shorts' Starstreak high-velocity short-range laser-guided missile is being launched for export today. Shorts Missile Systems, the guided weapons subsidiary of the Belfast company joined with Thomson-CSF of France, has delivered 135 such missiles to the British Army since October 1995, and the system gained its full in-service approval just a year ago. The Armoured Starstreak system is mounted aboard the tracked British Alvis Stormer AFV, carrying 20 missiles and a crew of three. It incorporates a Pilkington-Thom passive infrared aircraft detection system.

The missile has already generated "significant interest" among potential export customers who realize the benefits of a fully automatic vehicle-mounted low-level air defense system, Shorts' chairman Sir Roy McNulty told Show News.

Now that it's been proven in British military service, the British government has cleared Shorts to offer the system to other countries worldwide, subject to its normal approval of individual export sales.

An intensive improvement program for the Armoured Starstreak has brought system performance to beyond the UK MoD requirements, Sir Roy claimed.

"We are now very hopeful of further substantial MoD Starstreak orders later this year," he said. It is understood that British orders for Starstreak, which in the later stages of its very short hypersonic flight launches three armor-piercing darts at its target, now total more than 7,000 missiles.

Able to be fired from infantry shoulders, and also matched to lighter all-terrain vehicles in rapid reaction guise, the transformation continues of Starstreak into an air-to-air missile as well.

For use aboard the British Army Air Corps' forthcoming license-build AH-64 Apache helicopters and also, possibly, on U.S. Army AH-64s, integration and live firing trials continue at the Yuma, Arizona, proving grounds. According to Sir Roy-never a man for overstatement-they have been proceeding "reasonably well."

By Bob Rodwell