Description

The Dassault-Breguet Mirage 2000 was selected in December 1975 as the future combat aircraft for the French Air Force, to see service through to, and beyond, the year 2000. Returning the pure delta-wing layout adopted for the earlier and highly successful Mirage III/V series of fighters makes the Mirage 2000 almost unique amongst current generations of advanced technology fighter aircraft. The delta-wing layout offers some major advantages, but also has disadvantages, and Dassault-Breguet carried out much development work to improve the efficiency of such planforms, in the Mirage 2000, this is greatly assisted by the use of computerised controls and fly-by-wire technology, which give full control over any inherently unstable flight characteristics throughout the performance range.