Dassault Mirage III Mirage IIIA

The Mirage IIIA is the ten-aircraft pre-production series with which Dassault took the Mirage III-001 prototype to the configuration that would define the whole family. Ordered from May 1957, the IIIA lengthened the fuselage by 1.40 metres and increased the wingspan by 0.64 metres over the original III-001 to accommodate the necessary onboard equipment: radar (Dassault Super Aida, or Thomson-CSF Cyrano I bis on the last examples), the SNECMA Atar 9B turbojet — 42.8 kN dry and 58.84 kN with afterburner — and provision for a 13.34 kN SEPR 84 auxiliary rocket that improved ceiling and climb rate in the pure interception role.

The first pre-production aircraft, registered 'A 001', made its maiden flight on 12 May 1958 at Melun-Villaroche, flown by Roland Glavany, as documented by the record held by the Musée de l'Air et de l'Espace, which preserves this same aircraft in its Hall des Prototypes. The milestone that made the programme's name came on 24 October 1958: Glavany, flying the same A 001, exceeded Mach 2 in level flight, making the Mirage III the first European-designed aircraft to do so. In later test flights, using the SEPR booster rocket, the aircraft went on to reach Mach 2.2.

During the test phase, each of the ten pre-production aircraft was assigned to a specific part of the trials programme to speed up development: some were dedicated to weapons trials, others to engine or avionics trials. In June 1959 IIIA number 3 set a 100 km closed-circuit speed record. The programme was not free of losses: an accident destroyed aircraft number 5 in October 1960.

The IIIA never entered frontline operational service — that role fell to the Mirage IIIC, which derived directly from this pre-production series — but they proved decisive as a testbed for the airframe, powerplant and avionics of the whole later family: the IIIB, IIIC, IIIE and IIIR essentially share the architecture validated by the IIIA. The pre-production series was built and tested in an industrial context that RAND Corporation put at some 32,000 people involved in the whole Mirage III programme by around 1960, of whom about 5,000 belonged to Dassault, roughly a third of the French aerospace industry's workforce at the time. The success of the IIIA's flight test campaign — speed, stall behaviour, reliability of the variable-geometry air-intake system — is what allowed the Armée de l'Air to place, without further delay, the order for the first production version, the Mirage IIIC, whose first flight would come barely two years later, in October 1960.