Dassault Mystère IVA

Marcel Dassault’s company came back from the war with the straight-winged Ouragan and then swept its wing to make the Mystère II, but the Mystère IV was a fresh design: a new fuselage, a thinner wing swept at 38 degrees, a deeper fin and a tailplane set part-way up it, with a round nose intake and two 30 mm DEFA cannon under the cockpit. The prototype first flew on 28 September 1952, and the first production Mystère IVA followed on 29 May 1954. The first fifty had the Rolls-Royce Tay built under licence by Hispano-Suiza; the rest had Hispano’s own development of it, the Verdon 350.

The United States paid for much of the production. Under its offshore-procurement programme for NATO, American money bought 225 Mystère IVAs for the Armée de l’Air, one of the deals that put Dassault on its feet. About 421 were built in all. The type joined French squadrons in 1955 and became their standard fighter-bomber of the later 1950s; during the Suez crisis in 1956 French Mystères were based in Israel to guard its airspace. Israel itself took 60 and used them in the Sinai in 1956 and again in 1967, and India bought 110, which flew ground-attack sorties against Pakistan in 1965 and 1971.

By the 1960s the Mirage III and the Super Mystère had taken over the front line, and the Mystère IVA moved on to training, chiefly with the 8e Escadre de Chasse at Cazaux, which flew it as a weapons trainer until 1982. Because the American-funded aircraft were still US property, many were handed back when they were retired and flown to RAF Sculthorpe in Norfolk for disposal. Several went to British museums from there, which is why a French fighter that never served in Britain can be seen at Newark, Bungay and Coventry.