What happens to the wire after launching a fly-by-wire missile?
In: Engineering
Not much, it spools out and then just drops to the ground. Your question makes it unclear what you expect might happen other than that, but remember these are single-use devices that would need to be reloaded. The wire is part of the ammo that gets loaded, not the launcher.
The wire is discarded, and as you can imagine it can become a hazard.
During training teams have to go out of the range with a spool and collect the wire for disposal exactly for this reason. You don’t want a fiber optic cable laying around for something to snag.
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For a TOW missile, you just cut the wire from where you loaded it then drive off in your humvee.
A colleague of mine used to test fire fly-by-wire missiles and the wire is just discarded. This was on a large test range with god knows how many pieces of UXO out there, but because the land is shared for grazing with cows, he had to gather up all the wire after each shot. Apparently cows love to eat copper wire, but copper wire doesn’t love cows so if you don’t clean it up they’ll die.
Others have answered your question but I believe they are wire guided missiles and not fly by wire, which is a different concept in aviation.
TOW missiles have two capstan blocks in the front of the missile tube. The wires run from the rear of the missile, through the capstan blocks (very tricky to rewire when servicing the missile into the electrical connectors that link the missile’s tube to the firing post. When you unload a fired TOW missile two squibs (very small explosive charges), one in each capstan block, fire. This cuts the wires so when you unload the tube the wires just fall out, usually on top of the vehicle you fired it from.
Operationally you normally wrap the fired wires around a stake near the firing point and pull them in at the end of the day. When not firing from a static point the wire just gets discarded. If you do pull it in, make sure the missile on the other end went boom.
Source: tripped over a lot of guidance wires.
A former colleague of mine flew BO-105s in West Germany around the end of the cold war. He said that high voltage powerlines were a consideration when launching TOWs across the German country side, apparently that can cause a bit of a firework.
I worked on a consulting project in the live fire area at Fort Cavazos (was Fort Hood) long time ago. It amazed me how much thin copper wire was laying around on the ground. Miles of it. It was everywhere.
Found all kinds of interesting shit wandering around that place. One of the guys working with me walked up holding this long piece of metal maybe 2 inches in diameter. He was talking about how heavy it was. It was of course a depleted uranium armor piercing tank round. He looked really puzzled when I told him to put it down and get it the fuck away from his balls.
The main US land guided missile I used was a TOW (Tube Launched, Optically Guided, Wire Tracked). It uses a thin, just a hour thinner than a human hair, copper wire to transmit your inputs to the missile. In combat we just left the copper wire. It’s not really a hazard, and woukd slowly be covered with sand. Depending on the base, some US training bases would have you cut the remaining wire from the spool, then go roll up what was left, though with a live warhead range you just left it do to the chance of UEO (Un Exploded Ordinance). The only other wire guided missiles, as we are moving to fire and forget, are US ADCAP torpedoes, which use a fiber optic cable in the latest models, though they to used to use copper.
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