The Mirage III

Planes and Pilots. Mirage 5, 50 and derivatives from 1955 to 2000

The Mirage III goes back to a 1953 project intended to give the Armée de l'Air a light supersonic interceptor and is without doubt one of the most beautiful successes of the French post-war aircraft industry. A symbol of the French aircraft industry's rebirth after a war which had ail but killed it, this delta-wing fighter without horizontal tail surfaces (a configuration which has since become one of the Dassault Company's hallmarks) rapidly demonstrated its qualifies aboard, so much so that more than one thousand four hundred of ail versions have been made and acquired by almost twenty countries.

If for the French the Mirage III remains the symbolic mount for the 'Chevaliers du Ciel', the heroes of the comic strip immortalised on the television screens at the end of the sixties, its international reputation rests very firmly on exploits, very real this time which it performed in the hands of Israeli pilots during the Six Day War in June 1967 during which three-quarters of the victories were scored by this fighter. Thanks to this brilliant performance, several countries were interested in buying the Mirage, very often variants specifically designed for them ; in turn they used them in combat, either in South Africa, Pakistan or even over the unleashed fury of the southern Atlantic during the Falklands War.

It has now been replaced in the Armée de l'Air by its direct successor, the Mirage 2000 but it still flies in some air forces almost a half-century after the prototype's first flight, extra proof of the worth of the original concept, not to forget ail the derivatives in which the improvements ironed out the structural defects (high landing speed, poor handling at low speeds, etc.) and often changed the plane into completely new aircraft, like the Israeli Kfir and the South African Cheetah.