The Dassault Mirage is a French multirole, single-engine, delta wing , fourth-generation jet fighter manufactured by Dassault Aviation. The Mirage evolved into a multirole aircraft with several variants developed, with sales to a number of nations.
It was later developed into the Mirage N and D strike variants, the improved Mirage , and several export variants. Over aircraft were built and it has been in service with nine nations. Two years later, France withdrew from the project on grounds of costs, after which Britain would collaborate with West Germany and Italy to ultimately produce the Panavia Tornado. Dassault instead focused on its own variable-geometry aircraft, the Dassault Mirage G experimental prototype.
The Mirage started out as a secondary project tentatively named "Delta " in Dassault was devoting considerable attention to the Mirage G8A, a fixed-geometry derivative of the Mirage G8 that served as the competitor to the Panavia Tornado.
The AdA wanted a Mach 3 fighter, not an interdictor aircraft incapable of dogfighting that was the Mirage G8. As such, Dassault redesigned the Mirage G8 into the two-engine Super Mirage G8A that would prove to be ambitious and expensive, being two and a half times the price of the Mirage F1 and over-engineered, especially compared to the General Dynamics F that had just won orders from a number of European countries.
The ACF was a strike aircraft first and an interceptor second, while the Delta was the reverse, but the single-engine Delta was much more affordable.
