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.............................. Mirage 2000 Combat Aircraft
Logo and Trademark..............................
The Mirage 2000 is a French-built multirole fighter jet manufactured by Dassault Aviation. Designed in the late seventies as a lightweight fighter for the Armée de l'Air, it evolved into a successful multirole aircraft now in service in 9 countries with more than 600 airplanes built. The history of European new generation combat aircraft was quite confusing and obscure. The Mirage 2000 and the Panavia Tornado, despite being totally different, have a common ancestor. This was the AFVG (Anglo-French-Variable-Geometry), a program born in the late 1960s. This was only one of the many joint Anglo-French programs (as example, the SEPECAT Jaguar) but this one failed and France continued with a totally national project, the Avion de Combat Futur(ACF). This led to the Dassault Mirage G.8, much similar to Panavia Tornado. It had variable geometry wings and two powerful turbojets, and it is still the fastest aircraft ever made in Europe, with 2.34 mach. While Tornado continued as multi-national program without France (something happened lather with EFA), the Mirage G.8 was too costly and France looked for a cheaper aircraft. After the G.8 was cancelled in 18 December 1975 due to its growing cost and complexity, Dassault offered the Mirage 2000 as an alternative. This was the return to first generation Mirages, but with several important innovations that tried to solve their shortcomings. Chief projectist were B.C. Valliéres, J.Cabrière, J.C. Veber and B.Revellin-Falcoz.
Development of this small aircraft would also give the company a competitor to the General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon, which had defeated the Dassault Mirage F1 in a contest for a new fighter for the air forces of Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands and Norway. Small single-engined fighters were clearly the most appreciated by foreigner customers, as experience with the Mirage 4000 would show.The Mirage 4000 is an overgrown Mirage design (as happened with Mirage IV) that had no export success at all.
The prototype made its first flight in March 10, 1978 with test pilot Jean Coreau at the controls. Despite the new technologies applied, basing the new aircraft on the Mirage III allowed the development of a flyable prototype in only 27 months from the program start to the first flight, even if active service status needed another six years.
In that summer, at Farnbourgh airshow this machine displayed not only excellent handling capabilities, but also a full control at 204 km/h and 26 AoA. This was totally unexpected by a delta-wing fighter, and proof how CCD controls were capable to override the delta wing shortcomings, related with bad low-speed control, while retaining the advantages, as low-drag, low RCS, ideal high speed aerodynamic and simplicity, being without horizontal tail surfaces. Mirage 2000 was one of the star of that edition and became the direct adversary for F-16, which shared the CCD control and relaxed stability. 02 followed in 18 September 1978 and 03 in 26 September 1979 After 400 hours of flight, they were sent to CEV (Centre Experimental du Vol). 04 Prototype was a demonstrator made by Dassault for own purposes, and finally the first dual-seat M.2000B flew in 11 October 1980.
The first production example flew in November 20, 1982 and the aircraft went into operational service in 1984. They were practically pre-production aircraft, because they had no SARH missiles (RDM-1 radar) and the first model of SNECMA 'Super Atar'. M-53-2.
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