10/13/2026
We're not sure how you say "Harrier" in French, but we're pretty sure it's not "Balzac." š
Yet, it was on 13 October 1962 that one of the strangest-looking aircraft ever to wear the Dassault name lifted vertically from the ground for the first time: the Dassault Balzac V.
And before we go any farther, that is Balzac āVee,ā not Balzac Five. The V stood for "vertical," reflecting the aircraftās role as a vertical takeoff and landing, or VTOL, experimental aircraft.
France was then exploring a supersonic combat aircraft that could operate without conventional runways. The ultimate goal was the Mirage III V, a Mach 2-class VTOL fighter. Because the engines planned for that aircraft were still under development, Dassault and Sud-Aviation first built a smaller, subsonic flying laboratory to prove that the basic concept could actually work.
The Balzac V combined a conventional Bristol Siddeley Orpheus engine for forward flight with eight Rolls-Royce RB.108 lift jets installed vertically inside the fuselage. During takeoff and landing, those eight engines pushed the airplane upward. Once airborne, the pilot would eventually transition to conventional forward flight using the Orpheus engine.
BTW, its unusual name had nothing to do with the French novelist HonorƩ de Balzac. The aircraft incorporated part of the wing from the Mirage III prototype, which was serial number 001, and the number 001 happened to resemble the famous telephone number BALZAC 00-01 used by Jean Mineur PublicitƩ, a French cinema advertising company whose commercials were familiar to French audiences. The nickname stuck.
On October 12, Dassault test pilot RenĆ© Bigand conducted the aircraftās first stationary flight at Melun-Villaroche. For safety, the Balzac was restrained by nylon cables attached to the aircraft. A second tethered hover followed that day and another on October 15. Then, on October 18, Bigand made the first unrestricted low-level flight. By March 1963, the Balzac was successfully transitioning from vertical to horizontal flight, and completed the full sequence of vertical takeoff, forward flight, and vertical landing.
The Balzac V would never become an operational aircraft. It was a technology demonstrator, built to answer a question engineers around the world were wrestling with during the Cold War: Could a high-performance combat aircraft dispense with the runway altogether? For Dassault, the answer was at least technically yes, and the lessons learned from the little Balzac V led directly toward the much more ambitious Mirage III V.
