Dassault-Breguet Super Étendard: Difference between revisions

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Revision as of 19:57, 11 December 2007

Template:Infobox Aircraft

The Dassault-Breguet Super Étendard is a French carrier-borne strike fighter in service with the French and Argentine Navies. A small number were also flown by the Iraqi Air Force for a brief period during the Iran-Iraq War.

Design and development

It is a development of the earlier Étendard IVM that was originally to have been replaced by a navalised version of the SEPECAT Jaguar, the Jaguar M, until this plan was stalled by political problems. The prototype first flew on 28 October 1974. The French Navy initially ordered 60 of the new model, which were delivered in June 1978 and the Argentinian Navy ordered 14. The Super Étendard had been developed in parallel with a new air-launched version of Aérospatiale's anti-shipping missile, the AM 39 Exocet, and these were supplied to Argentina as well.

Operational history

Argentina

The Argentine Navy decided to buy 14 Super Étendards in 1980, after the United States put an arms embargo in place — due to the Dirty War — and refused to supply spare parts for their A-4Q Skyhawks. Argentine pilots utilised French flight trainers between November 1980 and August 1981 in France, but at the time of the Falklands War, they had received only 45 hours of actual flight time in the aircraft. Between August and November 1981, five Super Étendards and five Exocets were shipped to Argentina. All five of the missiles were used during the conflict, with one missile destroying HMS Sheffield and one the merchant aircraft transporter Atlantic Conveyor. Two missiles were used in each of those attacks. The fifth missile was launched in an attack intended to strike against the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible but the attacking aircraft failed to find their target. (A sixth Exocet, which damaged HMS Glamorgan, was a land-launched ship's missile, set up in an improvised truck-trailer platform by Argentine technicians.)

Iraq

Five Super Étendards were loaned to Iraq in 1983 while the country waited on deliveries of the Dassault Mirage F1s that had been ordered. These aircraft used Exocets to some success against Iranian tankers in the Persian Gulf before being returned to France in 1985.

France

From 1991, the original Étendard IVMs were withdrawn from French service, and the Super Étendards underwent continuous modernisation through the 1990s to enable them to use the latest generation of laser-guided precision weapons. These uprated aircraft, designated Super Étendard Modernisé (SEM) participated in NATO's "Allied Force" operations over Kosovo in 1999, flying over 400 combat missions with 73% of the assigned objectives destroyed : the best performance of all the air forces involved in the missions over Kosovo. The SEM also flew strike missions in Operation Enduring Freedom.

All Super Étendards are expected to be retired from French service by 2010, to be replaced from 2006 onwards with Dassault's Rafale M.