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Dassault, Mirage Jet Builder, Says He Has No Control Over Sale by France
By Clyde H. Farnsworth Special to The New York Times
Jan. 24, 1970
Credit...The New York Times Archives
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PARIS, Jan. 23 — Marcel Dassault, the French aircraft builder whose Mirages may be tipping the balance of power in the Middle East, in dicated today that he had nothing to do with policy re garding the sale of French military planes.
He maintained that the sale of Mirage jets to Libya and the embargo preventing Israel from taking delivery of 50 Mirages she had al ready paid for were politi cal matters. “It is the French Government that makes the policy of France,” he added.
While never going so far as to disavow the embargo, which was imposed by Gen. Charles de Gaulle after the 1967 Arab ‐ Israeli war, Mr. Dassault spoke of his friend ship for Israel, which had been his best customer for military aircraft.
“The Marcel Dassault Air craft Company, which has worked with Israel for 15 years, holds the courage of the Hebrew people and the ability of its pilots in the highest regard,” he asserted in an hour‐long interview.
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Mr. Dassault, who convert ed from Judaism to Roman Catholicism in 1947, refused to make planes for the Ger mans during World War H and spent three years in the Buchenwald concentration camp. After the war he changed his family name, Bloch, to Dassault, which is pronounced dah‐SO and was the code name of one of his brothers in the Resistance.
Considered a genius among aircraft designers, he is now one of the richest men in France. Of slight build, he is young looking for his years— he was 78 yesterday—and re markably sprightly.
The interview was held in a spacious office on the Champs‐Elysees in which pictures and models of Mi rages were mixed somewhat incongruously with Louis XIV furniture and French paintings. Under the condi tions of the interview, Mr. Dassault had the opportuni ty to revise in printed form answers to questions posed in an oral exchange. The printed answers were the only ones allowed to be quoted.
He confirmed that the 50 Mirages embargoed by the French and remaining with units of the French. Air Force “are flown often by Israeli pilots and maintained by Israeli mechanics.”
Other sources disclosed that since the affair last Christmas in which five French‐built gunboats mys teriously found their way to Israel from Cherbourg de spite the embargo, the planes had been provided with only 20 minutes' fuel for flights by the Israeli pilots.
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Excluding the 50, the Das sault company has sold Is rael 70 Mirage III attacks bombers and 80 other mili tary aircraft.
While customers deal di rectly with the company, contracts for military planes require authorization from the Government, which fi nances construction of the prototypes.
Mr. Dassault said that his company had built and sold more than 1,100 Mirages in the 12 years since the super sonic fighter‐bombers came off the assembly line.
Of these, he disclosed, a third were taken by the French Air Force and the rest were exported. The prin cipal foreign customers were Switzerland, Belgium, Israel, Lebanon, Australia, South Africa and Peru, he added. He did not refer to the cur rent transaction for 100 Mirages, including 20 train ers, for Libya.
The Mirage III, he said, represented the culmination of experience with earlier subsonic fighter ‐ bombers such as the Ouragan in 1950 and the Mystère IV and the Super‐Mystère B.
“Today we have succeed ed with a swing‐wing ver sion of the Mirage with more than 250 hours of flight time,” Mr. Dassault con tinued, adding that American and other pilots viewed the craft most favorably.
It was because of large scale sales of Mirage planes, he said, that Dassault could offer them at prices that are “very low compared with competing aircraft.”
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He did not disclose speci fic figures. French military writers have reported that the Mirages that Libya has ordered will cost something more than $145‐million, so the price per plane is rela tively low.
Mr. Dassault also said that his company had sold 350 fan‐jet Falcolns, a commer cial plane that has found a market mainly outside France. Pan American World Airways has ordered 250.
The company, which has no stock in the hands of the public and issues no finan cial reports, is run, Mr. Das sault said, in a way that is more economical than large American aircraft companies.
“In effect in the United States,” he said, “engineers are highly specialized while in France, schools turn out the complete engineer—that is to say, a man who knows aerodynamics, metal strength, the mounting of engines and the utilization of equipment. While several of my engi neers have the ability to de sign an, airplane all by them selves, in the United States it takes hundreds of engi neers to design as airplane.”
Further explaining his op erations, Mr. Dassault said he had never hired engi neers from another company but only those fresh out of the universities. He said that since he trained them him self, they now think the way he does.
Mr. Dassault said that when he started the com pany after World War II it was in effect a one‐man show—“that is to say, I was at once the chief technician, industrialist, salesman, finan cier, etc.”
Since 1951, when he was elected to the National As sembly as a Gaullist Deputy, he has shared some of his powers. One of the first en gineers he hired, Benno Val lières a Rumanian‐born grad uate of the Ecole Superieure d'Aéronautique who saw ac tion as a parachutist during World War II, became presi dent, assuming administra tive, industrial and financial responsibilities.
Mr. Dassault remained in charge of designing. “I kept for myself the part of the job that was most agree able since it was creative,” he explained. |