Shafrir 1 was a first attempt of the Israeli missile industry to develop an original air-to-air missile which will compete with the best of air-to-air missiles the world had to offer at the time. It never stood in the operational test, excluding three mig-21 kills. Also, its design was not satisfactory to the air force’s needs.
It was designed as a small missile which was based on a direct hitting. Its motor and warhead were of modest dimensions, a fact which caused to a decrease in performance. And if that was not enough, its warhead was designed initially without a proximity fuse.
During the development, no one had predicted any special problems in the production process. Eventually, it appeared to be the most problematic issue of the Shafrir 2 development program, and one that would affect the whole Israeli defense industry structure.
The heads of the defense industries wanted to increase competition between factories, in order to reduce costs and to increase efficiency. In opposite to their plans, IMI encountered some difficulties in the production of several composite parts of the missile. This led to a delay in turning the missile operational. Following that, Rafael took on itself the lead for the project, first as IMI's sub-contractor, and then as a main one.
The Shafrir 2 answered the engineer's expectations. It withstood almost all the designing demands they had faced it with. Operationally speaking, the Shafrir 2 was a tremendous success story, crediting to itself 106 enemy shot-downs. In terms of technology, it did not contain the latest developments available at the time, as the Shafrir 2 was the product the engineers wanted to create when they were designing the Shafrir 1.
In retrospective, the decision to use the Shafrir 1 homing head and its electro-optic proximity fuse was right. New technologies such as cooled homing head and electromagnetic proximity fuse were not available at the time, and had to be developed from scratch. Such an adventure could have ruined the whole project so it was decided that development of a rear-sector interception missile would be adequate. But when the development of the Shafrir 2 started, the American AIM-9D missile, which had a cooled homing head and an electromagnetic proximity fuse, had been already in production and had the ability to be launched at wider sectors. And indeed, prior to the completion of the Shafrir 2, it was obvious that the next generation of air-to-air missiles, the Python 3, was needed to be developed.
Nevertheless, the Shafrir 2 did not fall short of its technologically more advanced American rivals, in terms of operational achievements.
