Capability of the Mirage2000H – IAF has a story to

another interesting piece……

Capability of the Mirage-2000H – IAF has a story to tell!!

It was the time of the early 80’s when the PAF was aquiring the F-16s and IAF was still operating the lumbering Su-7s and Ajeets. By then the most advanced air defence fighter available to the IAF was the Soviet Union’s MiG-23, which the latter considered to be a perfection in both ideological and technical solutions. In the months of 1985, tensions were high on both sides, as war-call was knocking the doors. It was at that time that IAF realised, they needed to equip themselves with something superior, or atleast equivalent to the PAF F-16s. The Russian MiG-29 hadn’t entered the service of her own Air Force. It was then that IAF finally decided to aquire 40 Dassault-Brueget Mirage-2000H from France, and these aircraft stand at far superior position even today in the inventory of the IAF, than the recent Su-30k/mki.

When the Mirages had just arrived at Maharajpur AFB (Gwalior), the evil curse of the Pakis worked. It had rained so heavily in the night that the cockpit of the aircraft was flooded with water, even though the canopy was locked! You could have seen the technicians emptying the cockpit with buckets. In its early days, when the base was just under construction, the mirages faced slight difficulty in operating, but that was soon overcome with the french help.

What actually hurt most of the people was that this ‘peace of @#%$’ costed 140 crore Rs. per peice whereas the same amount could have fetched you a 140 MiG-21s! Once the matter stabalized, the flyers started realising that this aircraft was much much beyond the scope of their present understanding. For them who had been previously flying something like the Hunters or Gnats, it seemed to be the ‘purple UFO’ they saw in their dreams last night! They soon realised that this aircraft was not only capable of some fancy flying, but it had the right technological and ideological solutions to their problems. When the aviators and the engineers sat down to study the aircraft in technological depth, the whole concept seemed to be revolutionary. From FBW flight control system and the hydrolics, each and every pair of nut and bolt embedded a mark of quality from the french. It was realised by many at far later stage during the kargil war.
It once happened that an engineer, who had previously worked on the Mirages, went to Russia regarding some matter. During a conversation he just drew the point of contrast between the Mirage 2000 and MiG-29B. It was rumoured that the men at Mikoyan-Gurevich were outraged and made comments like, “We have made more aircraft than the french and we know how much important it is to make a COST-EFFICIENT aircraft rather than the fancy toys that Dassault-Brueget makes! Our aircraft is simple to operate, has better performance and is equipped with elements that the french will probably need to invent first.”

It is believed that the Indian officials were carried by this statement and decided to build the MiG-29s instead of the Mirages.

During joint operations between Jaguars and Mirages, the Jaguars would shy away in front of the deadly capability of the Mirage-2000. The FBW FCS gave it a leap forward in terms of handling at low altitudes and G-bump reduction. Mirages could make aproaches towards the enemy which demanded intense maneuvers at low altitude.
The second encouraging factor is the cockpit of the mirage, which features the most sophisticated avionics. Though MiG-29 pilots missed their HMTDS while flying in the Mirage, they loved pressing the HDD buttons. eg. the MiG-29 features a very simplistic HUD and Radar Display. The voice warnings in the Mirage, though not that sweet as that of Natasha’s in the MiG-29, were more status alerting. Even the Mirage Flight Mission Simulator is the most advanced in India.

During the Kargil war they played the most major role during high alitude bombing. Wg Cdr Nambiar (the one who took the pictures of LCA during its first flight) had something to say about his misson during the debriefing as he was briefed to fly the attack mission over Tiger Hill, “When I made the first fly pass I didn’t see anything anything in the snow, but still I tried hard to locate them. There were a lot of rocks and no sign of the infiltrators. Once again I made a final check, by flying across, and then I suddenly noticed a bright spot in my FLIR mode display, that I hadn’t seen on my first pass. On zooming, I noticed it moving and disappearing near a rock. On visual recheck I inferred it was the hard bunker that I had been instructed to take out with my LGBs. It wasn’t hard to illuminate using the LDP and the bomb hardly deviated half a metre or so and I guess I left none of them survived.” This guy was the one to drop 5 out of the total 8 LGBs used. On being asked about the performance of the mirage he said, “It was my choice posting to come to Gwalior and serve here in Battle Axes and fly the Mirage2000.” Obviously, he couldn’t have lived up with MiG-21 after flying F-16s in Israel.

Now to compare it with the Su-30s, Su-30, at present are more of a flying testbeds. I just happened to get a chance to sit in a Su-30K cockpit and believe me, it just had a few essential analog instruments and no MFD or Display. Though it did have a HUD, most of the components common even to the MiG-29 were missing. I relaxed when I learnt that it was under assembly. But the others weren’t any better. They had the standard Su-27 panels and instruments, all marked in Russian. One of the technicians spoke little bit english and told me that they would be soon assembling a Su-30MKI and I will love its cockpit. I’m gonna show you the picture that I took, but its layered with an existing image, just to keep the secret a secret. Then I had the chance to meet the head of the SU-30 tech flight dep. who himself had previously worked on Mirages. Most of the things he told me are of classified nature but to put a conclusion he declared that “it was an honour to work on the mirages. The Su-30s still don’t fly properly. Yesterday the engine of this one smoked out because of some reason I’m still unaware and we are investigating. Those from AIr HQ do tell us that the final MKI’s will be better. The FBW of these is not purely digital, as they still use mechanics to combine with the stick. Those of Mirages are 100% digital and the pilot’s stick gives maneuverability demand info to the main processor. There are 16 parallel processors in the mirage as compared to one in this aircraft. Studying Mirage was highly complicated.”