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.
