Dassault Mirage III variant
Dassault Mirage III Mirage IIID
Export two-seat trainer derived from the Mirage IIIE, inheriting the Atar 09-C engine and distinctive fairings under the nose. Per the captured material, 'an almost identical aircraft is designated Mirage IIIBE, IIID or 5D depending on the customer': Australia used the bare designation 'Mirage IIID' for its 16 licence-built two-seaters (two batches, 1966/1967 and 1973/1974), while other operators — Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Pakistan, South Africa, Switzerland — received variants with their own country letter (IIIDA, IIIDBR, IIIDE, IIIDP, IIIDZ, IIIDS) described in their own entries.
- 16
- Units built
History
The Mirage IIID is the generic designation for the export two-seat trainer derived from the Mirage IIIE, from which it takes the Atar 09-C turbojet — 41.97 kN dry and 58.84 kN with afterburner — and ventral fairings under the nose that visually distinguish it from other two-seaters in the family. The captured material is explicit about the naming ambiguity surrounding this version: 'an almost identical aircraft is designated Mirage IIIBE, IIID or 5Dx depending on the customer', so the letter D does not identify a single closed configuration but a family of export two-seaters based on the same IIIE/IIIBE pattern, adapted country by country.
The best-documented case of the bare 'Mirage IIID' designation — without an additional country letter — is Australia: the Royal Australian Air Force received 16 two-seat trainers under this designation, locally licence-built in two batches, one of ten aircraft in 1966-1967 and a second of six in 1973-1974, to complement its fleet of single-seat Mirage IIIO.
Other export customers received two-seaters based on the same IIID pattern but identified with their own country letter, each with its own history: the Mirage IIIDA for Argentina (two delivered in 1973 and another two in 1982), the Mirage IIIDBR for Brazil (local designation F-103D, four newly built units from 1972 plus two ex-French IIIBE delivered in 1984), the Mirage IIIDE for Spain (local designation CE.11, seven units), the Mirage IIIDP for Pakistan (five units) and the Mirage IIIDZ for South Africa (three units delivered in 1969, later expanded with more aircraft under the same designation family). Switzerland, for its part, received its own two-seater under the specific designation Mirage IIIDS, described in its own entry as a sufficiently distinct variant within the Swiss Mirage III programme.
Taken together, the IIID and its country-lettered derivatives fulfilled, in each customer air force, the same role as the IIIBE in the Armée de l'Air: transition and continuation training for single-seat pilots without sacrificing a combat airframe for the task, thanks to sharing essentially the same aerodynamics and powerplant as the Mirage IIIE.