Dassault Rafale Rafale C

The Rafale C is the single-seat, conventional take-off and landing version built for the French Air Force (today the Air and Space Force). In the early 1990s Dassault briefly used the designation Rafale D (D for discret) to emphasise the semi-stealthy features of the production design, which differed significantly from the Rafale A demonstrator. Prototype C01 made its first flight on 19 May 1991 at the company's Istres test facility, opening a test programme focused on the M88-2 engines, the human-machine interface, weapons and expansion of the flight envelope. Because of budget constraints the second single-seat prototype was never built.

It is the aircraft that sets the family's technical data: a 15.27 m fuselage, a 10.90 m wingspan, 4,700 kg of internal fuel, fourteen external hardpoints and a 30 mm GIAT 30/M791 cannon. At 9,850 kg empty it is the lightest of the three production versions, about 500 kg lighter than the naval Rafale M. The Air Force's first deliveries were to the F2 standard from 2005 (from airframe C103 in the factory sequence); according to the manufacturer and specialist sources the first operational squadron, EC 1/7, stood up in June 2006, and all earlier aircraft were later brought to the F3 standard. From 2008 deliveries went straight to the nuclear-capable, reconnaissance-capable F3, and from 2018 the fleet has been upgraded to F3-R and, since 2023, to F4.

The Rafale C is also the basis of the single-seat export aircraft: the Egyptian EM, the Indian EH, the Qatari EQ, the Greek EG and the Indonesian EI are adaptations of this version, and Croatia received ten second-hand Rafale Cs at the F3-R standard from the French fleet.