Mirage III at 70: Pakistan and Egypt Still Fly 166 Aircraft of Dassault's Delta Fighter Family
The Dassault Mirage III first flew on Nov. 17, 1956, and 70 years later the Mirage III/5/50 family, of which Dassault says 1,401 were built, remains in service with two air forces, GlobalMilitary.net data shows.
Tuesday marks 70 years since the first flight of the Dassault Mirage III, whose prototype, the Mirage III 001, took to the air at Melun-Villaroche in France on Nov. 17, 1956, according to Dassault Aviation.
The Mirage III A 01 followed with a first flight on May 12, 1958, and Dassault's test pilot took it to Mach 2, which the company describes as the first Mach 2 flight in Western Europe.
Dassault says a total of 1,401 Mirage III/5/50 aircraft were built from 1958 onward, and that the family served in 21 countries.
The French Air Force received 457 of them, according to Dassault, which breaks the deliveries down as follows:
- 183 Mirage III E
- 95 Mirage III C
- 70 Mirage III R/RD
- 59 Mirage III B/B1/B2/BE
- 50 Mirage 5F
The first Mirage III C landed at Dijon-Longvic on July 7, 1961, and Dassault describes it as Europe's first operational Mach 2 aircraft. The company's record puts the type's entry into operational service with the French Air Force on Dec. 19, 1961, and says the last French Air Force units withdrew it in 1994, with some aircraft remaining afterward at the CEV flight test center.
Development continued well after the original production versions, according to Dassault, which lists the Mirage III NG, first flown on Dec. 21, 1982, and the Mirage III EX, first flown on April 8, 1988, among the later variants.
Seven decades after the first flight, the Mirage III/5/50 family remains in service with two air forces, according to GlobalMilitary.net's inventory data: the Pakistan Air Force with 85 aircraft and the Egyptian Air Force with 81, or 166 aircraft in all. These counts are GMN database estimates of current fleets, not official figures.
The same GMN data shows the Israeli Kfir, developed from the Mirage 5, still flying with Colombia, which has 16, and Sri Lanka, which has 5.
Dassault's later fighters are more widely used. The Mirage F1, which first flew on Dec. 23, 1966, remains with five air forces in the GMN data: Morocco with 25, Iran with 17, Gabon with 6, Libya with 4 and the Republic of the Congo with 2.
The Mirage 2000, which first flew in March 1978, is in service with nine air forces, GMN data shows:
- France: 78
- United Arab Emirates: 59
- Taiwan: 52
- India: 46
- Greece: 24
- Egypt: 18
- Qatar: 12
- Peru: 11
- Ukraine: 6
Egypt is the only country in the GMN data that operates both the Mirage III/5/50 family and the Mirage 2000; a side-by-side comparison of the Mirage 2000 and the Mirage III/5/50 sets out how the two generations differ.
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