Dassault Rafale C

The Rafale C is the single-seat, conventional take-off and landing version of the Rafale built for the French Air Force (today the French Air and Space Force). To cover its missions — air defence and air superiority, reconnaissance, close air support, precision strike and interdiction with conventional weapons, and nuclear deterrence — the Air Force asked for two land-based versions: the Rafale C (for "chasseur", fighter) and the Rafale B (for "biplace", two-seater). In the early 1990s Dassault used the designation "ACE/Rafale D" (D for "discret"): in 1988 defence minister André Giraud added a classified low-observability clause to the programme requirement, and the production aircraft was completely redesigned relative to the Rafale A demonstrator, apart from the main-gear wheels, to reduce its signature and later rely on the SPECTRA electronic warfare suite.

Prototype C01 was ordered on 21 April 1988, in the same contract as the other three development aircraft (one B and two Ms), and first flew on 19 May 1991 at Dassault's Istres test facility. It opened a test programme aimed at expanding the flight envelope and testing the Snecma M88 engines, and then the human-machine interface and weapons. A second single-seater, C02, was planned but cancelled in autumn 1991 because of budget constraints. Painted black to suggest its stealthiness and shown at Farnborough that year, C01 looked much like the Rafale A but was a different aircraft: thanks to the M88, more compact than the F404, it was a tonne lighter (8.5 t against 9.5 t), 50 cm shorter (15.27 m against 15.80 m), with 0.34 m less span (10.86 m against 11.20 m) and 2.3 m² less wing area (45.70 m² against 47 m²). It had a twin-wheel nose gear, a simplified delta wing extended by an apex towards the intakes, and a shortened fin. It came in under the specified weight while carrying more internal fuel than required, and approach speed fell from 117 to 110 knots (from about 217 to about 204 km/h). To prepare for SPECTRA integration it carried a Mirage 2000-style fairing. On 24 January 1994 it flew in formation with the Rafale A on the demonstrator's last flight, together with B01, M01 and M02. Stored from 2007 at Air Base 279 Châteaudun and added to its CANOPEE collection in 2013, C01 now stands on a plinth at the Hexagone Balard, headquarters of the Ministry of the Armed Forces, unveiled on 14 October 2019, repainted in operational colours with the number 15 and a stork on the fin.

In production, C101 was a test aircraft delivered in April 2003 as part of the first tranche ordered in 1997. The third tranche, ordered in 2004, included 36 Rafale Cs at a unit production cost of €46.8 million, and by 18 November 2010 the state had ordered 69 Rafale Cs out of 180 aircraft in total. Operational deliveries began at the F2 standard in 2005, from C103 onwards; all F2 aircraft were later brought to F3. C137, the first of the 60 fourth-tranche aircraft fitted with the RBE2-AESA active-array radar and the first European production aircraft with such a radar, was accepted by the DGA on 2 October 2012. By 31 December 2018 the Air Force had received 48 single-seaters. It is the lightest of the three French versions: 9,850 kg empty, 4,722 kg of internal fuel, fourteen hardpoints (the Rafale M, about 500 kg heavier, drops to thirteen) and a GIAT 30M791 cannon; its 24.5 t maximum take-off weight is the same as the Rafale B's.

The Air Force's first Rafale unit, fighter squadron EC 1/7 Provence at Air Base 113 Saint-Dizier, was declared operational on 26 June 2006; in those early years its planned complement was mostly two-seaters. From 8 February 2008 Rafales were based at Kandahar in Afghanistan: the first detachment flew two-seaters and the second Rafale C F2s armed with the AASM. During Operation Serval (Mali, 2013), one Rafale C from Saint-Dizier and three from Mont-de-Marsan deployed to N'Djamena air base alongside two Rafale Bs. At Mont-de-Marsan, the 2/30 Normandie-Niemen fighter regiment was declared operational on 25 June 2012, and squadron 3/30 Lorraine later completed the 30th wing. Rafale Cs have flown Baltic air policing from Poland between May and September 2014 and, with the 30th fighter wing, from Šiauliai in Lithuania between 31 January and 31 March 2025. The fleet has followed the programme's standards up to F4, brought into service progressively between 2023 and 2025.

The Rafale C is also the basis of the single-seat export aircraft (the Egyptian EM, Qatari EQ, Indian EH, Greek EG and Indonesian EI). In 2021 Croatia bought twelve used Rafales from France, ten of them Air Force single-seaters; the first official handover took place on 2 October 2023 at Mont-de-Marsan, and France ordered new aircraft to replace them.