AP 118 · No. 10 Section II · Aircraft Plate 150 / 178

Plate 150 of 178 · Cold War · Delta-wing strike fighter

Dassault Mirage IIIE

Mirage IIIE, painted as No. 538 ‘3-QH’, the Yorkshire Air Museum’s Dassault Mirage IIIE, a French Air Force tactical strike and attack fighter that served until 1993 and was presented to the museum at Elvington, the wartime home of the two French heavy-bomber squadrons of the RAF: Dassault’s Mach 2 tailless delta, with one SNECMA Atar 9C turbojet fed by half-cone intakes beside the cockpit, a Cyrano radar in the nose and the IIIE’s Doppler fairing beneath it, shown standing level on its tricycle undercarriage: French tactical camouflage of olive drab and light blue-grey with silver undersides, a black radome, French roundels on the intake fairings and the upper wings, red intake lips and cone tips, red ejection-seat warning triangles, a black ‘3-QH’ on both sides of the nose, white nose-gear doors carrying ‘538’ and the boar’s-head badge of EC 3/3 ‘Ardennes’ on the fin (the starboard camouflage mirrors the port side’s pattern, and the upper-wing pattern is not traced from photographs).

3D model

Turn it over

A procedural model built in Blender from published dimensions, drawings and photographs, painted as No. 538 ‘3-QH’, the Yorkshire Air Museum’s Dassault Mirage IIIE, a French Air Force tactical strike and attack fighter that served until 1993 and was presented to the museum at Elvington, the wartime home of the two French heavy-bomber squadrons of the RAF: Dassault’s Mach 2 tailless delta, with one SNECMA Atar 9C turbojet fed by half-cone intakes beside the cockpit, a Cyrano radar in the nose and the IIIE’s Doppler fairing beneath it, shown standing level on its tricycle undercarriage: French tactical camouflage of olive drab and light blue-grey with silver undersides, a black radome, French roundels on the intake fairings and the upper wings, red intake lips and cone tips, red ejection-seat warning triangles, a black ‘3-QH’ on both sides of the nose, white nose-gear doors carrying ‘538’ and the boar’s-head badge of EC 3/3 ‘Ardennes’ on the fin (the starboard camouflage mirrors the port side’s pattern, and the upper-wing pattern is not traced from photographs). Drag to orbit, scroll or pinch to zoom · download .glb (1.0 MB)

Data plate

Specification

First flight, number built and top speed are for the whole family (); engine, crew and dimensions are for the Mirage IIIE modelled here.

History

The Mirage IIIE

Dassault drew the Mirage III in answer to a French Air Force call of the mid-1950s for a light interceptor that could climb fast and fly at twice the speed of sound. It took the tailless delta wing it had tried on the smaller Mirage I and built a bigger, heavier aircraft round a single SNECMA Atar turbojet, with half-cone centre bodies in the intakes beside the cockpit to manage the supersonic airflow. The Mirage III-001 first flew on 17 November 1956, and in October 1958 the pre-production Mirage IIIA became the first European aircraft to fly at Mach 2 in level flight. The Mirage IIIC interceptor joined French squadrons in 1961.

The Mirage IIIE was the multi-role version. Its fuselage was stretched by 30 cm to take more fuel and a bay of avionics behind the cockpit, it had the Atar 9C engine, the Cyrano II radar, a Doppler navigation radar in a fairing under the nose, and it could carry bombs, rockets, missiles and the AN-52 tactical nuclear weapon. The first of three prototypes flew on 1 April 1961, and the French Air Force took its first production aircraft in January 1964. The IIIE became the backbone of French tactical strike squadrons for two decades, and the last were retired in the mid-1990s as the Mirage 2000 took over.

The Mirage III and its simplified offshoot, the Mirage 5, were Dassault’s great export success: about 1,400 were built and some twenty air forces flew them. Israel’s Mirage IIICJs fought in the Six-Day War of 1967, Australia and Switzerland built them under licence, and Argentina’s Mirages flew against the Royal Navy over the Falklands in 1982. The Mirage IV, a larger twin-engined delta that first flew in 1959, was France’s nuclear bomber from 1964. The Yorkshire Air Museum holds one of each, and they are the only Mirages in a British museum.

This airframe

Mirage IIIE No. 538

538The airframe modelled

No. 538 is a Mirage IIIE of the French Air Force. In 1972 it was flown by Denis Turina, later a colonel and a member of the Yorkshire Air Museum, whose father flew Halifaxes from Elvington with the Free French heavy-bomber squadrons. After it last flew in 1993 the French Air Force gave it to the museum, which stands on the airfield those squadrons used. The model shows it as photographed outdoors at Elvington in 2020: French tactical camouflage of olive drab and light blue-grey over silver undersides, a black radome, French roundels on the intake fairings and the upper wings, red intake lips and cone tips, red ejection-seat warning triangles, the code “3-QH” in black on both sides of the nose with the name “Cne D. TURINA” beneath the cockpit, white nose-gear doors carrying “538”, and on the fin the boar’s-head badge of Escadron de Chasse 3/3 “Ardennes” with “538” above it. The camouflage on the starboard side mirrors the port side’s, although photographs show the real pattern differs in detail, and the upper-wing pattern is not traced from photographs.

See it at Yorkshire Air Museum

Where to see one

In the gazetteer

The gazetteer records the Mirage IIIE in one UK collection. The airframe modelled here is marked.

Every airframe and serial All 178 plates

Profiles and models are procedural interpretations built in Blender from published dimensions, three-view drawings and photographs of each airframe. Treat the museum aircraft as the reference.