The Skyflash, or Sky Flash in marketing material, was a medium-range semi-active radar homing air-to-air missile derived from the US AIM-7 Sparrow missile and carried by Royal Air Force McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantoms and Tornado F3s, Italian Aeronautica Militare and Royal Saudi Air Force Tornados and Swedish Flygvapnet Saab Viggens.

It offered significantly better performance than the original seeker, allowing British Aerospace to dispense with upgrades to the warhead that were carried out in the US to address poor accuracy.

Skyflash was tested in the US, but after trials against experimental monopulse seekers from Raytheon, the United States Navy elected to order a different monopulse-equipped version of the Sparrow, the AIM-7M.

Skyflash came out of a British plan to develop an inverse monopulse seeker for the Sparrow AIM-7E-2 by General Electric Company (GEC) and the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) at the end of the 1960s.

Tests of the resulting missile showed it could function successfully in hostile electronic countermeasures (ECM) environments and could engage targets under a wide variety of conditions.

Skyflash was therefore converted to the 5000 TEMP series to incorporate the Frazer-Nash recesses in the body of the missile, Launch Attitude Control electronics in the autopilot section and improved wing surfaces.