The fighter jet that kept fighting... itself

In the world of fighter jets, the Mirage family is instantly recognisable. Those French deltas carved their place in Cold War skies. But wait, you want me to tell you that the French built a Mirage without delta wings? It looked different, it had wings and a tail like a normal fighter, and it didn't have that Dorito shape of its famous predecessor. But this wasn't just a Dassault's engineers broke the tradition because they had to. The delta wing was fast, yes, but it came with serious compromises. Long runways, blistering landing speeds, and dogfights that turned into exercises in energy management rather than agility. The Mirage F1 was built to fix all that. It would become France's frontline fighter throughout the 1970s and 80s. It would fly combat missions from the deserts of Chad to the mountains of Afghanistan, and served everywhere from Iraq to South Africa. And along the way, it went nose to nose with MiGs, shot down Tomcats, and even fired Exocet missiles at ships in the Persian Gulf. This is the story of the fighter that dared to defy its own family and prove that sometimes breaking tradition is exactly what keeps you in the fight. In the 1960s, the French Mirage 3 had made a name for itself as a nimble Mach 2 interceptor with a distinctive silhouette. The Mirage 3 and its derivative the Mirage 5 were exported around the world and proved excellent for the era. This was the time when everybody thought the future of air warfare was going to be high-speed interceptions fought with radars and missiles. All while the MiG-21 and F-4 faced off in Vietnam to prove that they were all wrong. At least for the time being. Mirage's Dorito wing with no tail came with massive trade-offs. The Mirage 3 needed long runways and high landing speeds, and it wasn't the most agile dogfighter at lower speeds. Vietnam proved that dogfights were now still very much a thing, and Vietnamese pilots who trained for them extensively, unlike the US pilots in the early stages of the war, had the edge in that type of combat. Then that famous fancy school that they made a movie about came along and everything changed. On the other side of the world, the French Air Force planners realized the next generation fighter would need to overcome these limitations. They wanted a jet that could do pretty much everything that the Mirage 3 couldn't. So they decided to build, you guessed it, another Mirage. Now here's where the story gets messy because in the mid-1960s Dassault wasn't working on one new Mirage, they were working on about five of them at once, and only one was being paid for with their own money. The French government funded the big projects. There was the Mirage F-2, a large twin-seat strike fighter with a conventional swept wing and tail, essentially the F-1's bigger brother, and there was a proposed interceptor version called the F-3. There was also going to be a VTOL experimental one with a battery of lift jets stuffed into the fuselage, because it was the 1960s and someone was always stuffing lift jets into something. And then there was the swing wing Mirage G, since variable geometry was the fashionable answer to every question after Vietnam. Side note, the Mirage G deserves its own little scandal here. In 1965 France and Britain signed up to jointly develop a swing wing fighter, the Anglo-French Variable Geometry Aircraft, and Dassault was the French partner. Then in 1967 Dassault walked away from the joint project and rolled out its own swing wing Mirage G at almost the exact same time. The British were, let's say, not thrilled and accused Dassault of quietly undermining the partnership all along while learning everything that they could. And keep that move in mind because it won't be the last time that Dassault plays hardball and next time it won't go their way. But while the government money flowed into big expensive prototypes, Marcel Dassault himself was hedging. He suspected that the large jets were a export dead end. They were too big and too pricey for the countries actually buying French fighters. So starting in 1964 the company quietly funded a small cheaper single seater on its own dime. A scaled down F-2 with one engine, one seat, and one job. Be the fighter that air forces could actually afford. And that private gamble was the Mirage F-1. The F-2 first flew in June 1966 and it flew well. It proved the whole point of leaving the Delta behind. More fuel, shorter runways, a better low speed handling. But it was big and it needed an American derived turbofan. And France didn't love depending on Americans for their engine technology so the air force looked at its budget and realised that it had plenty of strike fighter aircraft already and no money for another one. What they needed was an interceptor. And wouldn't you know it, sitting right there flying on Dassault's own funds since December 23rd 1966 was a lighter cheaper jet that could do the job. The F-1 prototype was in a hurry to prove it. On its fourth flight, just two weeks after its first takeoff, test pilot Rene began pushed it past Mach 2. Two weeks. Some fighter programs take two years to get to that point. By February of 1967 the Air Force of France met up its mind and that spring the French announced that they would buy a hundred of them with the big reveal planned for the Paris Air Show at the end of May. But the F-1 never made it to Paris. On May 18th 1967, one week before the show, Big And was flying fast low altitude practice passes near Fort Semer when the horizontal stabilizers began to vibrate. The oscillation fed on itself growing faster and more violent in a phenomenon called flutter where aerodynamic forces and the structure's own flexibility get locked in a feedback loop. At high speed, flutter can tear the control surface apart in seconds and that's exactly what happened. The tail surfaces broke away and the aircraft hit the ground and Rene Begand, Dassault's chief test pilot, was killed. The company's brand new fighter ordered just weeks earlier was now a in the south of France. It says something about how much confidence the design had earned that the order stood anyway. The engineers traced the flutter, reinforced the tail and three pre-production aircraft picked up where the prototype left off from 1969. And by 1974, the first Mirage F-1C with C standing for Chasseur, fighter in English, entered squadron service marking the beginning of a beautiful friendship with French pilots. So what exactly did they get? Instead of the Mirage III's delta wing, the F-1 sported a shoulder mounted swept wing and conventional horizontal stabilizers at the rear. This seemingly simple change brought significant advantages. The separate wing and tail meant that the F-1 could use high lift devices like flaps and slats which the deltas of the 1960s couldn't accommodate. The result was a fighter that could take off in roughly half the distance and land 25% slower than a Mirage III while still topping Mach 2 up high. Maintaining energy in dogfights was also much easier than with the previous design. As a bonus, the new wing packed internal fuel tanks, boosting combat range by roughly 40%. The fuselage was derived from the Mirage V, but the nose was elongated to house the new Thompson CSF radar, giving the F-1 all weather interception capability the older Mirages lacked. And let me geek out for a second because under the hood sat a single Snecma ATAR-9K50, a refined version of the Mirage III's engine with more thrust and better reliability. But we gotta talk about weapons as well. It would have twin 30mm cannons, radar guided missiles under the belly, heat seekers on the wingtips and 7 hardpoints for everything from bombs to Exocet anti-ship missiles. And remember that last one because Exocet is going to matter. By the early 1970s then, Dassault had a genuinely excellent fighter. And that's when they went for the biggest prize in aviation history and got absolutely flattened. Across NATO, 4 countries, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway all needed to replace their aging F-104 Starfighters at the same time. The press called it the deal of the century and Dassault wanted it badly. Their pitch was the Mirage F-1E, an upgraded F-1 with the brand new M-53 engine being developed for France's future fighters. And Dassault didn't just pitch a jet. For Belgium they assembled a whole bundle, F-1s for the Air Force, Alpha Jet trainers, even Mercure airliners for the national carrier. Buy the ecosystem, get the discount. But there were two problems. The first was that Belgium's previous Mirage purchase had ended in a bribery scandal, so trust us it's a great deal was now a tough sell. Their second problem flew for the first time in February 1974 and it was called the American made F-16. Against a lighter, more advanced fly-by-wire jet backed by a 650 aircraft American order and the full lobbying weight of the Pentagon, the F-1E with its half-developed engine never really stood a chance. In 1974 the Netherlands chose the F-16 and Norway, Denmark and Belgium followed. Dassault lost the deal of the century and it stung so much that it reshaped French fighter policy for a decade. But here's the thing about losing NATO. The rest of the world was still shopping and for every country that couldn't buy American, who wouldn't buy Soviet or was under an arms embargo that France was willing to squint at, there was a Mirage F-1 with their name on it. I'm talking about Iraq, Libya, South Africa, Spain, Greece, Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait, Ecuador. 14 countries in total with over 720 orders. France had lost the deal of the century to the Americans and accidentally armed half the planet's flashpoints instead. Which is how the Mirage F-1 ended up fighting on both sides of almost every war it ever touched. The first preview came in Africa. South Africa, staring down a UN arms embargo, managed to get its F-1 fleet delivered in 1975, just weeks before the door slammed shut. Those jets went straight into the border war where South African pilots found themselves dogfighting Cuban pilots flying Soviet MiGs. Which is about as cold war as a war can get without either superpower officially showing up. The F-1s held their own against MiG-21s and scored kills. Against the faster MiG-23s they were underdogs and one Mirage limped home so badly damaged after taking a missile that it never flew again. The scoreboard against the 23s stayed stubbornly at zero. But meanwhile, further north, France was learning what it feels like to meet your own product in the wild. Libya had bought Mirage F-1s in the late 70s, back when the romance with Paris was still blooming. By the 80s, France was flying combat missions over Chad against Libyan forces. French Mirages on one side and French built Mirages on the other and thankfully for everyone's paperwork, no confirmed kills either way. Consider that a dress rehearsal for what's about to happen. Because the country that truly put the Mirage F-1 through hell was Iraq. Starting in 1977, Iraq ordered wave after wave of customized F-1s, over 80 by the mid-80s, with better electronic warfare gear, improved weapons, and critically, the compatibility with the Exocet anti-ship missile. France, eager to keep that sweet cash flow coming from the desert, even loaned Iraq five Super Intarda attack jets while the F-1s were still on the production line, just so Iraqi crews could start practicing anti-ship attacks early. But the Tomcats dominated the skies and Iraq could do very little about it. But once the Mirage F-1s arrived in numbers, the balance shifted. The F-1s range and all-weather radar let Iraqi pilots venture deep into Iran with confidence, flying strikes older jets couldn't reach and waging the so-called tanker war in the Persian Gulf, where F-1s lobbed Exocets at oil tankers and anything else that floated. And then in November 1981, an Iraqi Mirage F-1 pilot did something that nobody had ever done before. He shot down an Iranian F-14 Tomcat, the first ever air-to-air kill against the time. This was a massive psychological win because the Tomcat was Iran's apex predator, and downing one proved that it wasn't invincible. Over the following years, F-1 pilots claimed more Tomcats, plus Phantoms and F-5s, hunting in low-level ambushes, popping up for a shot, and then running before the Phoenix missiles could answer. The Tomcats hit back hard and dozens of Iraqi F-1s went down in return, and it became a deadly game of cat and mouse where the F-1 proved to be a solid performer, even though it was never a wonder weapon. For eight years, the little French fighter was arguably the biggest threat the desert cats ever faced. Then Iraq invaded Kuwait. France deployed 12 Mirage F-1s to Desert Storm. Iraq fielded dozens. And so for the opening days of the air campaign, the French jets stayed on the ground, because in the crowded trigger-happy skies over the Gulf, an Allied F-1 and an enemy F-1 looked identical on radar, and pretty similarly out of the canopy too. France had exported its fighter so successfully that it actually exported itself out of the war. Once identification procedures were sorted, the French F-1s flew reconnaissance and pathfinder missions, using their navigation systems to lead Jaguar bombers to targets at night. They would finish the war without firing at another fighter, and then just collected the participation medal. The Iraqi F-1s got no such courtesy. F-15s shot several down in the opening days, and the survivors quickly learned that staying alive meant fleeing and hiding. One F-1 pilot, chasing an unarmed American EF-111 electronic warfare jet, followed it into a low-altitude evasive maneuver and flew straight into the ground, giving the F-111 family its only air-to-air kill ever, scored by an aircraft with no weapons. And the strangest part came at the end. Rather than lose the fleet on the ground, Iraq evacuated dozens of aircraft, including Mirage F-1s, across the border to Iran. The same air force that had spent eight years being ambushed by Iraqi Mirages was now owned by them. Iran, chronically short of fighters, kept some of those ex-enemy jets flying for decades. There are double agents with more straightforward loyalties than this aircraft. Back in France, the F-1 story after the Gulf is really a story of demotion. Throughout the 90s, the Mirage 2000 took over its jobs one by one, air defense, strike, nuclear wallet, all gone. The F-1 should have been retired by the turn of the century, but it didn't survive for one reason. The reconnaissance variant, the F-1CR, could do something nothing else could do in the French air force. And so the frontline interceptor of the Cold War spent its final decade as a camera platform. It photographed the Taliban in Afghanistan, it went back over Libya in 2011, this time on the winning side of the paperwork, and flew its very last combat missions over Mali in 2013, scouting targets for other aircraft to hit. France finally retired the F-1 in 2014 with a farewell tour and a Bastille Day flypast over Paris. Fittingly for a jet that had been the backbone of the fighter fleet throughout the late Cold War, a number of survivors found second careers in the United States as private contractor aggressor aircraft, hired to play the bad guys against American pilots in training, which honestly might be the most on-brand retirement imaginable for this particular jet. But here's the question worth chewing on. Was the F-1 actually right? Because look at what France did next. The Mirage 2000, the jet that replaced the F-1, went straight back to the Delta Wing. So did the Rafale after it. Fly-by-wire computers had arrived and they could tame the Delta's low speed vices while keeping all of its strengths, solving with software the problem that the F-1 had solved with hardware. Which means that the Mirage F-1, for all of its success, was a detour. A 15-year window in history where the Delta's weaknesses were real and computers weren't ready, and thus so filled that gap with a conventional fighter built as a private gamble on the boss's lunch. And yet 720 were built, 14 nations flew it, and it drew first blood against the mighty Tomcat, with some still flying today. Sometimes breaking the rules doesn't mean that you were right forever, it means you were right exactly when it mattered. Thanks so much for watching, and let me know what other stories you'd like me to cover here on the channel.