French Eagle - the Dassault Mirage 4000 

The Founder of Dassault Aviation, Marcel Dassault once said "A plane that looks good is a plane that flies good"

*laughs nervously in MS406*

**pisses pants in Amiot 143**

😉

**proud in his Block MB152**

The 2000 might just be the 4000 because of upgrades.

The French have always had a feeling for style.

@@andersnilsson7917 For jet engined planes, i fully agree, but for piston engined ones, Italians are nonsuch.

@@Zorglub1966 Yes, true, the WWII italian fighters were beautiful, also the seaplane MC 72.

@@Mael1er oh! yes!!

@@Zorglub1966 D.520, VG33.

"Saudis might ban RU-vid" funny! ;)

Well the mirage 4000 became the Rafale

But they have no issue buying new aircraft....

Alternatively, the last laugh is on the French, for giving Khomeini a place to run his revolution from in exile.

The Tonka is a great Striker, but it's not a fighter and neither will all the thrust in Christendom and Islam make one out of it. Choosing the Tornado F.2/3 over it was a bad choice. You can make a case for the GR/IDS/ECR Tonkas though.

She 😁👍

Likewise. Used to watch the show from the roof of our office building where I worked on the site. Much closer to the flight line so hard to get any work done in the afternoons during show time.

Looks nice just hope it is not yours but part of the enemy. Looks Good but is Dog Pooh.

@@trevorhart545 And yet they regularly stomp most other NATO platforms in DACT. Oh well, can't fix stupid.

Hmm, maybe the US had Quiet talk , but that would never happen.

@@paulbaker9277 Tell that to Lockheed, who tried their best to bribe and cajole others into buying their aircraft before all others...

@@cassandrafoxx4171 I reckon their was a lot of talk.

probably US diplomacy, like with the submarines?! Joke aside, hasn't Australia purchased F111 instead, or was it for another purpose?

Also, since the French were so advanced, it really didn't make sense for them to participate in the Eurofighter programme.

in a way it's not really a matter of luck, it's geopolitics. The Americans have always tried to smother the French aeronautic sector, for reasons that i presume to be half economic interest, half pride. we have a population that is basically 1/5th of them, and yet somehow manage to challenge their tech superiority especially in the aerospace sector. they don't really like that. Unlike most NATO countries that for the longest time aligned themselves on the US, France has always tired to keep its own geopolitical independence, which means that we could sell arms to countries who didn't want to appear too friendly with either the US or USSR. but every now and then the American government will bully some country who would likely buy our stuff so that they buy F-something's instead. Typically it happened a few weeks ago in Switzerland, both the public and the pilots were really in favor of the rafale, but then biden came to visit, and who would have guessed ? now the swiss air police will fly F-35s, an aircraft that is completely overpriced and makes no sense for them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Would have loved a M4000-9F3

I worked at Northrop during the chaotic, political times of the trying to sell the F20 to the Air Force for a top notch, $9,million fighter plane for export and the Air National Guard. So, I very much appreciate the very knowledgeable

Comparaison to the very excellent French mirage. I worked in marketing, and we had the likes of Chuck Yeager helping us , but General Dynamics had over a hundred (at least) minions in Washington - We had five.... so crooked!

Mirage 4k is the 'old rafale'?

The most successful M 2000?? Is this a joke? F16 outsold it by 7:1 and still selling...M2000 closed its doors 15 years ago.

​@@barracuda7018thanks to american lobbying machine... Like for the F35...

This is a way to ensure peace indeed... Si vis pacem para bellum...

And it's not only that, the list continues with many more technologies where the French have put their own unique signature. For example, unlike the British they didn't get the nuclear bomb know-how from America, but run and developed their own nuclear program. And, again, same as the plane, they sold their own know-how later to Israel (and probably South Africa). So, yeah, they do deserve all the respect for all those technological achievements they continue producing to this day.

@@alexandermishev6897 the nuclear weapon is a french idea who was proposed by Frederic Joliot Curie in 1939 before the WWII. He discovered the caracteristics of the Uranium 235 and proposed to the defense ministere to use it like a weapon.

@@oOLuNaTiC93Oo heavy water had been stored for that .... evacuated in May 1940 to North Africa ,then the West Indies.

@@oOLuNaTiC93Oo and it was not just an idea it was patented and two of his collegues(Hans ALBAN and Lew KOWALSKI) went to the UK and later to the US to help american scientist who where far behind at the time. When they learned all that the French scientist could teach them they were fired from the project Manhattan and forbidden to work in the US, so they just build the first nuclear reactor of Canada instead.

actually this helped them a lot in making rafale. which is kind of a mirage 4000 on steroids.

This would have far more likely been sold to Iraq instead of Iran

@@aadisingh9146 the rafale actually has smaller engines, partly because it needed to be a lot lighter to fit on an aircraft carrier. but the experience from that program was invaluable, the rafale rolled out in advance on its schedule which in a way is really the ultimate flex anyone could ever pull off 😅

Another one of these is the publisher Elsevier. ;-)

Bom-bar-dee- eh ...more Canadian imo.

Bom-bar-deer sounds better.

those of a mindset akin to that of an angry Québécois, always have to bombard non-'Bécois with their niche micro-reich version of culture war sub-nationalism, like very delayed action Vichy resistance.

;)

Who cares? Brits got the order and the work.

@@atilllathehun1212 short term win. What about the long term, though? More dodgy deals? Always comes back to bite you, when you don't want it to. Like now.

@@atilllathehun1212 That's what the Argentinians response to the English protests after Maradona's "Hand of God" goal.

@@EdNashsMilitaryMatters Ethically I have never seen what is wrong with greasing the wheels for an Arms deal? I mean you are selling a product whose job is kill people so morally it seems you have crossed the Rubicon and throwing some money around to ensure your product is picked over somebody else just does not seem wrong to me in that context. To rob a quote from another film - it is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.

Sure took a long time before anyone bought any Rafales.

less than 250 built in 35 years of production is hardly a market success.

@@Ushio01 the Rafale Marine enter in service in 2002 in temporary configuration F1 (to replace in urgence the very old F8 Crusaders) before heawy improvings for the F2 in 2005, so in real is the definitive Rafale is built sinze 16 years and not 35...

@@Ushio01 35 years? Wow Rafale entered service since 1986? 🤣🤣 Then again 250 is quite large for today's standard

@@LuqmanHM production not entered service. Exclude the early production jets and the 250 number goes below 200.

It's known as rafale nowadays. Allmost all of the system including many of the designs directly went into Rafale

The 80th F14 was kept in the US initially as test bed for a lot of modifications that the Iranian air force had requested. Once the Islamists took over, the US kept the plane.

In the late 70s Iran had about 240 F 4s and 79 F 14s. Its air force was far better supplied than medium power countries like Britain Germany France and Japan.

@@steveharvey6421 .... _initially_ ..better supplied, casualty ignoring crew training & purged service personnel, only, ...with no future spares or upgrades available from manufacturers/US to operate them adequately for long.

Ditto every other US President since Carter.

@@mootpointjones8488 Though Reagan made his presidency fun to watch... and you have to give Trump entertainment value, watching his multi-unit trainwreck in action

@@mootpointjones8488 Regan was actually a very good PoTUS, I don't know what you're talking about. Everyone after him...yeah not so great.

@@ImpendingJoker Reagan was a good president for his time. He projected a strong image vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. He built up the military, and at that time, he made the US stronger than any other country around. He also killed a lot of social programs, and his trickle-down economics concepts by his team failed miserably. Every other president since him, well, some did good things, most screwed up. trump was a disaster. Anyone who says he did a good job is simply deluding themselves.

The Biden administration will be considered Carter 2.0 by historians.

India is doing that with their tejas for the Indian navy.

@@sankubanku1633 That just got cancelled though

That sounds like the Arie, one of the concepts in a program that was scaled down and became the Lavi.

That might be a bit of a hard sell given that the Rafale is already there for anybody who wants a heavier twin-engine fighter with greater payload than the Gripen. The Gripen's biggest selling point is that it has much lower operating costs than other 4.5-gen fighters, while still having equivalent air-to-air capability and not that much worse air-to-ground. I'm not sure if trying to compete even more directly with the Rafale than they currently do would be to Saab's benefit.

The A37 was killed by a kfir c2, not the F1. still I love how nationalist Peruvians desperately try to save face after those shootdowns.

And there was me worrying so hard to get the museum right at the end :)

@@EdNashsMilitaryMatters That's OK. Better to know about the planes. We can go somewhere else to learn French.

@@EdNashsMilitaryMatters that one was ok :)

Effectively the french gvt made a terrible mistake supporting Khomeini and his goons, with a little common sense they could've spared the world a lot of troubles, given how Iranian revolution destabilized the WHOLE area (a lethal domino: invasion of Afghanistan by the russians, Iran-Iraq war, 1st gulf war, spreading of religious/islamic fanatism in the World, terrorism....all for the perverse idiocy of French politicians to follow a politic of"Grandeur" and trying to be a great power)

You dont take into account that the french made billions during the war providing weapons to irak and iran ( mostly irak though) So you could argue helping komeny was a good investement

Even so i allways admired the French lineage of aircraft and the Mirage family in particular.. they all were excellent fighter craft.. and all that done by a single country with 5 times less population than the united states.. while the British have some brilliant planes too i think overall the french beat them .. a shame they retired from the Eurofighter program.. but i understand them... the EF is brilliant but the development was a clusterfuck of arguing over how to do stuff .. they should had centered in doing the airframe and engines and leave some flexibility over radar and avionics so they could had moved forward sooner

@@sparrowlt Yes, but that´s always the big issue with joint projects. Everyone needs something specific that gets in the way of the project as a whole. One of the few cases where it worked out well was the german/french Alpha Jet, but those instances are rare.

@@sim.frischh9781 the Alpha Jet is just a trainer.. there is not much to do there. the airframe and engines... the EF the problem was the avionics, ECM suite, the radar, etc.. Germany was by far the most annoying part of the whole consortium

@@sparrowlt The Alpha Jet was also meant as a light ground attack and anti-helicopter plane. And Germany being annoying is the norm anyways.

the typhoon is more related to rafale than the mirage 4000 but they still be relatively close cause rafale uses design from the 4000. The typhoon was an european aircraft and the french just get out of it and did his own cause the typhoon wasn't really what we wanted.

@@thechuck2684 Makes sense. Thank you.

Mirage 4000 is a Rafale in Pre-Alpha so yes.

weeeeee 🙂🙃🙂

Shhhsh or the Saudis will ban RU-vid.

The same way the F-104G managed to beat the F11F-1F Super Tiger and Saunders-Roe SR.177. British Aerospace showed they'd learned how to play Lockheed's game.

Take a look at the F 16 XL. Very sexy prototype

No. There was an interview available on RU-vid, the Dassault/Thales officials said they was working on a more advanced radar and electronics technologies for the Mirage 4000. A fighter jet of this size really need to see very far, since it's a very long range aircraft. This advanced technologies finally arrived on the Rafale.

The deal wasn't just about Tornados, it included Hawk trainers, Jetstream Nav trainers, minesweepers and more plus a continued service and support package in place since they brought Lightnings and Strikemasters in the 60's. The UK largely set up and trained the Saudi AF lending them Hunters and early model Lightnings at the start. France's package included similar and much more, the much more largely not wanted by the Saudis but the French took a 'take it or leave it' approach. In the end the Saudis brought 96 Tornado IDS strike aircraft and 24 ADV versions. I saw the Mirage 4000 at the F.I. 80 and 82 airshows, it was an impressive aircraft but if your own air force won't buy it it harms sales and customers worry about long term technical support. The Tornado was in service with three nations when the Saudis brought it.

@@grahambuckerfield4640 Thanks! 🙂 That's a good overview.

Not " Rafael " but RAFALE

to have the ability to go to mach 2.2, it was quite something, i agree

Budget talks.

"Plan Canard"

the weakness cines at mid-low speed short radius dogfight turns. at least without canards.

@@winstonwolfe5733 that's where the power to weight ratio comes to play. In short, engines.