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months for just 99 Cents. Check out the link below. In the late 1960's, Dassault
Aviation made a huge bet. The company designed its first commercial airliner,
the Mercure 100, to do one thing fantastically well. Fly short routes more
efficiently than any other airliner. With the hope of taking on rival giants like
Boeing, Dassault invested large sums into developing its new jet, and built several
factories in anticipation of demand. But if you've never heard of the Mercure,
it's because airlines weren't interested in buying it. And Dassault's new jet would
go down as one of the worst commercial failures in aviation history. designed and built by French aircraft
manufacturer Dassault, the Mercure 100 first flew in 1971. It
was an impressive aircraft for its day with advanced aerodynamics and a wider
cabin than its competitors. And it offered some pretty impressive features,
including a heads-up display system for its pilots. The Mercure had great
performance characteristics, especially climbing out of congested airports. But
most importantly, it was efficient. The Mercure had been highly optimized for
short-range air routes. So here's a plane that would save Airlines money. But to
understand why virtually no airline ended up buying it, we need to look at
the Mercure's development, and why Dassault built the aircraft in the first
place. In the 1960s Dassault was a company renowned for its iconic Mirage
military fighter aircraft and Falcon business jets, but the company had bigger ambitions and had spotted an opportunity. See many civil air routes around the
world were actually very short, under a thousand miles and at the time a lot of
these short haul routes were served by Boeing's recently introduced 737 and
Douglas DC-9. Dassault figured that if it could design an airliner optimized
specifically for these very short routes then it could outperform Boeing's and
Douglas's offerings in a key segment of the market. With low operating costs and
a break-even load factor, airlines initially showed interest. But building
such a plane was an ambitious undertaking. Luckily for Dassault the French government was also convinced of the
market demand for a specialized short-range airliner. The government was
eager for Dassault to build a 737 competitor and to spur France's aviation
industry. It provided a loan for just over half the development costs, which
were to be repaid through sales of the aircraft. Development started in 1967 and
Dassault was so confident in the Mercure concept that had built four factories
across France to meet the anticipated demand. Reportedly the company was
expecting to built its 300th airliner in less than a
decade. Like the rival Boeing 737, the Mercure was powered by a pair of proven
but now dated Pratt & Whitney turbo fans But despite having virtually the same
engines as the 737, the Mercure could carry more passengers and despite being
larger the Mercure could even out climb the 737. These impressive performance
advantages were due to the Mercure being so well optimized for short sectors. By
significantly reducing fuel tank size, Dassault reduced the structural weight
of its airliner by as much as 10%. By using state-of-the-art computer design
tools, Dassault created a specialized wing giving the Mercure excellent climb
and descent performance - an important metric for efficient short haul flights.
But these advantages, of course, come with some trade-offs. See a fully loaded
Mercure had a maximum range of only one thousand miles. A Boeing 737-200 had a
much greater range, up to three times as much on some later variants. But there
was also another important design difference. A 737 was a robust aircraft
which could be suited to serve both short and medium sectors, so Boeing was
able to adapt the airframe and adopt new engines to cater to different segments
of the market a 737-100 introduced in 1968 carried a
103 passengers over 1,700 miles. But after four decades of
development the 737 had evolved into an entire family of aircraft, with some
variants having more than twice the passenger capacity and range of the
original. While the Mercure had also been designed with stretch potential, its
mission was always going to be decidedly short-haul. Modifying the aircraft to
increase its range so it could serve a broader segment of the market like the
737 wasn't going to be easy. And so the Mercure's high degree of
design optimization for short-haul routes, rather than being a competitive
advantage quickly became an enormous problem. Dassault aggressively marketed the Mercure as an economical choice for airlines. With its unparalleled short
range performance, it should have been attractive to airlines that were
operating 737's and DC-9's on short-haul routes.
But the Mercure refused to sell. See if you operate the Mercure out of France,
Dassault's proposition makes some sense. But from outlying European countries
like Spain, the Mercure's limited range is... well very limiting. And in the United
States that limited range becomes an even bigger problem. Airlines, as it turns
out, we're willing to take a hit on operating efficiency even if it meant
they'd have an aircraft that was versatile to fill both medium and short
range roles. Some argue that Dassault's decision to market the Mercure as a
direct 737 competitor also contributed to its commercial failure. Well in many
ways the Mercure was a conventional airliner its range made it more of a
high-capacity regional jet. But there were other factors going against the
aircraft, like the 1970 Oil Crisis which limited Airlines purchasing power, a
devalued US dollar and a high rate of European inflation - all of which had made
the Mercure more expensive to purchase. Air Inter, an
airline in which the French government had a large ownership stake, was the only
airline to ever purchase Mercure's and it ordered only 10. An 11th Mercure, a
prototype that had been refurbished was later also delivered to the airline. Dassault struggled to recover from its colossal commercial miscalculation, and
reportedly the company would need to sell somewhere between 120 and
150 Mercure's just to break even. So the
company raced to develop improved versions like the Mercure 200C, which
was to have improved range. But the Mercure design's had been so carefully
optimized for short routes, you could say the company had engineered itself into a
corner. Because the extensive design modifications that would have been
needed to give the Mercure additional fuel capacity, well, were simply too
expensive to ever make it a profitable proposition. The 11 Mercure's that did
enter service would go on to fly until 1995. They safely carried over 44 million
passengers and made over 400,000 flights - albeit short efficient flights. But the
story of French aviation didn't end with the Mercure, it
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