The Dassault Mirage F.1.
Last week Reuben Johnson posted a good article on the Rafale, which reveals certain underlying truths about not only the French aerospace industry, but European aerospace generally. The first thing one must remember is Dassault aircraft were never particularly good as compared to comparable American or even British designs. The early Ouragan, Mystere and Super Mystere were all inferior counterparts of the F-86 Sabre and Hawker Hunter, which entered production mainly because of Gaullist political requirements–“La Gloire” required France to compete in the skies with the Anglophones. Yet none of those early Dassault fighters had much export success–Israel being the only major buyer, and then usually acquiring less than one hundred examples of each. Dassault’s reputation was really founded on the Mirage III family of supersonic delta-wing fighters. Yet of the entire first generation of Mach 2 jets (which would include the MiG-21, the F-104 Starfighter, the F-105 Thunderchief and the F-106 Delta Dagger), the Mirage was probably one of the worst, being somewhat underpowered and slow to accelerate, while its delta wing caused it to bleed off speed rapidly in tight turns. With a complex and unreliable fire control system, it was originally armed with the balky and ineffectual Matra 530 air- to-air missile. Yet the Mirage went on to become one of the most successful (from a sales standpoint) fighters of the 1960s and 70s. For that, Dassault can thank the Heyl ha’ Avir–the Israeli air force. More or less forced to buy the Mirage III because every other jet was embargoed, they insisted on certain key modifications (most notably the installation of two 30mm DEFA canon and additional fuel tanks), and developed tactics that exploited every strength of the Mirage design and every weakness of its principal opponent, the MiG-21. After the Israeli’s astounding victory in the Six Day War, and the record of kills racked up in the subsequent War of Attrition, everybody was lining up to buy Mirages (embargoed by the French, the Israelis themselves reverse-engineered a much-improved version of the Mirage with a U.S. J79 engine, known as the IAI Kfir–some of which were actually purchased by the U.S. for use as aggressor aircraft in the Top Gun program). Knowing a good thing when they saw it, the French government aggressively assisted Dassault in marketing the plane to all possible customers, including former French colonies, wealthy oil states, and pariah nations such as South Africa, which could not acquire high performance aircraft from either the United States or the Soviet Union. Dassault even developed a ground attack variant (the Mirage V), which was sold to Libya and a number of Latin American countries. Yet, through it all, the Mirage III/V family remained an under-powered, short-legged, barely adequate fighter. None of that seemed to matter in the aura of Israeli aerial invincibility and French marketing smog. But by the 1970s, the 1950s-vintage Mirage was growing long in the tooth and losing ground to the U.S. “superfighters”, particularly the F-16 Falcon. The swept-wing Mirage F.1, essentially a Mirage III with a conventional wing-tail configuration and better avionics, was purchased by the French Air Force, by a number of former French colonies in Africa, and by South Africa, but in comparison with the Mirage III/V, sales were relatively poor. So Dassault attempted to develop the Mirage III concept using state-of-the-art technology, including revised avionics and “fly-by-wire” electronic controls. The result was the large, twin-engine Mirage 4000, and the single-engine Mirage 2000. The former attracted few potential buyers, and was even rejected by the French Air Force; but the Mirage 2000 became the principal fighter-attack aircraft of the French Air Force (largely replacing the Mirage F.1), and for a number of export customers, including Egypt, India, Peru, Taiwan, Qatar, the UAE, and Greece–but the number sold paled when compared to those of the F-16.
As compared to the Mirage III and F.1, the Mirage 2000 offered a much higher power-to-weight ratio, a modern cockpit with heads-up display, a useful multi-mode radar, and decent air-to-air armament. Perhaps more important, Dassault exploited fly-by-wire technology by making the Mirage 2000 dynamically unstable (i.e., the plane would not naturally fly a straight and level course) by moving the center of gravity aft. This meant that the control surfaces of the big delta wing were typically deflected downward (enhancing lift) rather than upward (increasing drag). The Mirage 2000 was thus an agile dogfighter capable of holding its own against most of its contemporaries. However, it still had a number of serious shortcoming, It’s SNECMA M53 turbofan engines, while more fuel efficient than the Atar turbojets of the Mirage III, were still heavier and less economical than contemporary U.S. engines. It’s radar performance was modest compared to those of the latest U.S. multi-mode radars. But its worst drawback was the big wing. The French air force, and many export customers, intended to use the Mirage 2000 not only as a fighter, but as a ground attack aircraft, and when flying close to the ground, the big delta wing gave such a rough ride that pilots reported it difficult to read the instruments. Artificial stabilization control gave only modest relief, and the Mirage 2000 remains an unsatisfactory low altitude strike aircraft to this day (particularly as compared to the F-15, F-16, and F-18). Dassault initiated the Rafael project to replace the Mirage 2000 with a more versatile and stealthy fighter that could compete in the export market against the F-16, the Eurofighter Tyfun, and the Swedish Saab JAS.39 Gripen. For political reasons, the French government refused to participate in the Eurofighter Typhoon program, so it gave its full backing to the Rafael both for the French Air Force, and to replace the aging Super Etendard fighters flown from French aircraft carriers. At first, fortune smiled on Dassault, as both the Eurofighter and the Gripen suffered a number of technical problems that delayed their introduction, and the Rafael beat them into the air by three years. However, the ubiquity of the the F-16 (over which the Rafael has only marginal advantages at best), and the political importance of the Eurofighter within the EU, essentially blocked the traditional sales outlets for the Dassault fighter. With the French Air Force and Navy ordering only small numbers of aircraft, unit costs remained several times higher than that of a comparably equipped F-16, and even more than the grossly overpriced Eurofighter. When one throws into the equation such advanced and mature aircraft as the Russian Su-30 and MiG-29, export prospects for Rafael remain dim, and it is not clear how Dassault can remain a viable independent designer and manufacturer of advanced combat aircraft. For their part, the Swedes have more or less conceded that the Gripen will be the last indigenous Swedish fighter, simply because the costs of designing and building a new fighter exceed the resources available to a mid-size country. The future of combat aircraft production therefore resides in the United States, Russia, China and India; if Europe wishes to compete, it can do so only through multinational programs such as Eurofighter. But the development of that aircraft demonstrates the problems and risks of bringing together several countries with diverse requirements and priorities–too many cooks can spoil the broth, and the Eurofighter has taken far too long and costs far too much for the modest capabilities it delivers (as I have said before, “F-16 performance at F-22 prices”). Nonetheless, political imperatives as well as the pooling of resources mandate the multinational approach for the foreseeable future. It may be hard to get such a program off the ground, and harder still to see it through to the end, but Europolitics ensures a higher chance of success than any national program. Whether the game is still worth the candle is another issue–as I noted in “Coalition of the Incapable,” it is not clear that Europe in fact needs very many high performance combat aircraft, given its limited capabilities in other areas. But national prestige probably ensures that Europe will continue trying to build its own fighter aircraft for some time to come.
