ARMEE DE L' AIR Mirage 2000 vols Djibouti!

more videos at: http://freeaviation.freeforums.org/index.php The Mirage 2000 is a French-built multirole fighter jet manufactured by Dassault Aviation. Designed in the late seventies as a lightweight fighter for the Armée de l'Air, it evolved into a successful multirole aircraft now in service in 9 countries with more than 600 airplanes built. Avion de Combat Futur (ACF) was developed for the French Air Force in the early 1970s. After the ACF was canceled on 18 December 1975 due to its growing cost and complexity, Dassault offered the Mirage 2000 as an alternative. This was a return to the first generation Mirages, but with several important innovations that tried to solve their shortcomings. Project chiefs were B.C. Valliéres, J.Cabrière, J.C. Veber and B.Revellin-Falcoz[1]. Development of this small aircraft would also give the company a competitor to the General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon, which had defeated the Dassault Mirage F1 in a contest for a new fighter for the air forces of Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands and Norway. Small single-engined fighters were clearly the most appreciated by foreign customers, as experience with the larger, twin-engined Mirage 4000 would show. The prototype made its first flight in March 10, 1978 with test pilot Jean Coreau at the controls. Despite the new technologies applied, basing the new aircraft on the Mirage III allowed the development of a flyable prototype in only 27 months from the program start to the first flight, even if active service status needed another six years. In that summer, at the Farnbourgh airshow, this machine displayed not only excellent handling capabilities, but also a full control at 204 km/h and 26 AoA. This was totally unexpected by a delta-wing fighter, and proof how CCD controls were capable of overcoming the delta wing shortcomings related to poor low-speed control, while retaining the advantages, such as low-drag, low RCS, ideal high speed aerodynamics and simplicity, provided by the absence of horizontal tail surfaces. The Mirage 2000 was one of the stars of that airshow and became the direct adversary for the F-16, which shared the CCD control and relaxed stability[2]. 02 Prototype followed in 18 September 1978 and 03 in 26 September 1979. After 400 hours of flight, they were sent to CEV (Centre Experimental du Vol). 04 Prototype was a demonstrator made by Dassault for its own purposes, and finally the first dual-seat M.2000B flew in 11 October 1980. The first production example flew in November 20, 1982 and the aircraft went into operational service in 1984. They were practically pre-production aircraft, because they had no SARH missiles (RDM-1 radar) and the first model of SNECMA 'Super Atar'. M-53-2. The last Mirage 2000 was delivered on November 23, 2007.[3] The Mirage 2000 is scheduled to be replaced in French service by the Dassault Rafale, which became operational with the French Air Force on June 27, 2006. The Mirage 2000 production line was shut down in November 2007 after the last aircraft had been delivered to the Hellenic Air Force.