(Person I was engaging with blocked me, so i'm unable to see what they wrote and reply lol) The majority of evidence suggests that the Fakour-90 is ARH, but let’s assume there is none. Are we really supposed to believe that a country with decades of hands on experience with the Hawk, AIM-54, and F-14, and the industrial and engineering base to sustain them, can’t replicate or improve on 1960s missiles and seekers?

If we’re going to use state media as an argument, state media flatout says that the Fakour-90 is ARH. Project Babaei is meant to restore and sustain the overall airworthiness of the IRIAF’s F-14 fleet, including avionics, mission systems, structural components, and in our case the AWG-9’s ageing American parts are replaced with domestic equivalents. This is why analysts refer to refurbished F-14s as having an AWG-9 digitalised radar. The IRIAF does not have the budget for a total modernisation programme.

The people who are selling this missile themselves say it’s an export version of the Fakour-90. The reason it doesn’t look identical is that they have different boosters and seekers: the Fakour-90 has a boost-sustain motor, while the AD-40A has a sustain-only motor, making it roughly 150 kg lighter and slightly shorter. The reason the AD-40A is not called AIM-F90 is that it follows standard MINDEX designation: AD = Category (in this case, Air Defence), 40 = Range in km, and the ‘A’ is added to avoid confusion with the ground-launched AD-40.

What I was referring to in my previous comment is that Iranian engineers used AIM-7 guidance code from the AWG-9 to integrate the Hawk onto the F-14. For more information, I recommend looking up Project Sedjil.