T he Mystère-Falcon 20 might well have been still- born had it not been for the foresight and iron will of company founder and chief engineer Marcel Dassault. During the first two decades after World War II, the firm established itself as France’s only pri- vately owned and most successful developer of military jets. Dassault employed roughly one-third of the staff of large French aerospace organizations. It was a very lean firm that each year hired the top 35 to 40 honor gradu- ates of the country’s three top technical institutions, known as “ Les Grandes Écoles , ” according to a 1973 Rand Corp. report. Monsieur Dassault personally interviewed many of the job applicants and chose their initial work assignments. ENTER THE OURAGAN Members of Dassault’s elite engineering teams were impressively talented and equally opinionated when it came to projects they chose to endorse. From 1945 to 1965, Dassault leapt into the jet age as fast as any aircraft manufacturer. The first fighter jet from its engineering house was the 1949 MD 450 Ouragan— “Hurricane”— also France’s first homegrown military jet. The Ouragan marked the resurgence of the French aviation industry
after WWII, and firmly established Dassault as the coun- try’s preeminent developer of combat aircraft. While it was designed for the French Air Force, the MD 450 sold well in the export market to Israel, India, and El Salvador. The Ouragan spurred the evolutionary development of the MD 452 Mystère series of fighters, starting in 1951, followed by the MD 550 Mirage series in 1958—each with more speed, better systems, and enhanced high-speed stability. Pushing up to and beyond Mach 1, Dassault recognized the need for irreversible hydraulic flight con- trols that were immune to compressibility effects. When no suitable ones were available, the firm designed, devel- oped, and perfected its own flight control actuators and artificial feel systems. Embracing an evolutionary, incremental, low-risk design philosophy, Dassault produced almost two doz- en Ouragan-Mystère and Mirage fighter variants in the 1950s and 1960s, earning a reputation for consistently meeting cost, schedule, and performance targets. The company’s strong suit centered around its leading-edge engineering and meticulous program management. Dassault farmed out some—and sometimes most—of full-rate production to French state-owned manufactur- ers, in large part to ward off the temptation by the coun- try’s officials to nationalize Dassault because of its profit-
Marcel Dassault (second from the right) hosts Charles Lindbergh (fourth from the right) in reviewing the Mystère 20.
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator