An EFIS with curved edges. That would be late 90’s/early 2000’s vintage then.
I was flying a Citation II once and a Piaggio overhauled us. They were up at FL400. It was embarrassing. 
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It is basically as fast as a prop can go. Very impressive. And it looks awesome. I heard that it is pretty loud though.
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Loud and a very unique sound to them.
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I got a call to spool up for a 0330 departure for an organ run. Did all the preps and paperwork, called to arrange fueling and advise FBOs, then right as I was going to bed wondering what kind of horror show the Wx was going to be when I woke up at 0200, the trip scrubbed. 
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Spent today in the museum of air and spaceflight in Paris, France and boy do I have some pix for y’all!
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Unless you caught an early morning flight I think you should be getting close to being timed out for the day.
Wheels
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It was a wet and rainy day. On my way to the museum from the hotel, only about a thousand meters, I got a thorough soaking. That Caravelle is a very very pretty aircraft, right up there with the Comet.
This is a very special machine, a one-off prototype of the Mirage 4000. Indeed, twice as much as the regular Mirage 2000 we all know and love. It was too much airplane, and never got sold.
Interestingly the forward fuselage seemed to have some area ruling, leading to sunken cheeks, like it’s been fasting or something. 1990s emaciated supermodel looks 
Rain threatened and I ducked back inside. Along some lovingly kept warbirds (a Mustang, a Spit IX, a FW190 and a Dewoitine) was this absolute unit of a fighterbomber. Holy heck what a thing! Notice the door with a porthole in the fuselage. If we build the thing like a brick sh!thouse, why not put a door in?
The main course. The Mona Lisa of aviation in my opinion. Displayed together are a line bird and the first prototype, allowing one to spot differences and changes.
The prototypes exhaust nozzles (note it has thrust reversers, I never knew!)
The ones on the line bird. Notice how the fighter style turkey feathers are omitted for a much simpler and probably more efficient installation.
Speedy bird is happy bird, even while resting in a museum.
Interesting to see how the space between the inlet ramps is “naked”. You get a view of raw plane guts.
So pretty. A poem of science and ambition. Also very well kept.
One was allowed to walk through the exhibits. Here are the cockpit shots. These birds were highly complicated, needing to pump fuel around in order to stay in trim.
The interior was cramped. I had to walk stooped and the windows are tiny.
Tickets were quite expensive, about as much or a little more than a first class ticket on a regular flight. Passengers got a lot of leg room, and a mach meter up front that would go way beyond 1.0 after they made feet wet.
A cool thing about this museum is that they had some of the displays accessible to blind people:
So that was Concorde. TBC.
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In the Concorde hall, three exhibits were tucked away in the corners:
The absolute bonkers Big Stick of French foreign relations from the 60s until the 90s:
“Is this special” @TheAlmightySnark says? “it’s just every day work for me!”
Oh look, @BeachAV8R has been flying this one:
(this Jaguar actually made it home after taking a MANPAD hit in the Desert Storm campaign of 1991)
Outside the hall were four birds parked outside in the rain, all looking rather decrepit, A Draken, a two-seater Viggen, a Mig-23 and a Su-22. I didn’t take the time to make pictures for you lot, but in the next hall I did, because I knew you guys would love this stuff: The prototype hall.
France’s first jet aircraft:
Isn’t it cute?
Or how about this insanely tiny scifi thing from a late 1940s comic strip:
It was a research aircraft pioneering the use of a delta wing. The insane courage one must have had to pilot this thing off the ground. My balls shrank just looking at it.
But was it the most insane contraption there? Mais non!
The 1950s were a wild age.
Turbojets at the tips and a motherlovin’ rocket engine in the middle.
The French are said to have invented the ramjet engine (in 1919!). This prototype was built right after the 2nd world war:
It was launched from the back of a transport aircraft because ramjets do not provide static thrust, they need to be moving at a fair clip to even ignite. Insanely, the pilot was inside the nose cone.
The thing worked well enough to build a bigger, faster version.
The amazing bit of plexiglas that enclosed the pilot. Not the weird prisma thing on top to give at least a modicum of forward visibility.
Of course this arrangement didn’t work as well as they dreamed it would and for the last iteration of the ramjet fighter they chose a slightly less bonkers, yet (to my eyes) still very forward looking arangement:
This thing worked, and was about as fast as a Mig-25. The last version had a turbojet sitting inside the ramjet, sharing the inlet and exhaust.
The mirage III was a great success as we all know, so they got creative with it:
D’Assaults answer to the VTOL question. Strip almost all fuel and things from a Mirage III, stuff it full of lift jets and you can take off vertical, go supersonic and land vertical… on paper. Because you ain’t got no fuel to do that. Nor are you carrying any payload.
A collection of doors flying in close formation. It’s been done before
A little later they tried a different aproach:
High lift swing wings, because why not! Economics, that’s why not. A lump of titanium strong enough to hold the wings broke the bank. The US navy can tell you all bout that
Look at this stupidly pretty and very tiny aircraft:
I started to run out of time, so I skipped space hall in order to take some pictures of helicopter and air force hall.
TBC
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This one, I was happy to discover only in the end, else it would have eaten all my time in the museum. A plexiglas Mirage F1! Feast your eyes on this @Freak !
Ah, such a lovely machine 
I wonder what drove the French to buy F-100s. Perhaps the Super Mystere (bottom right) was a bit of a disapointment and the Mirage wasn’t quite ready yet?
Isn’t that the Eagle Dynamics logo?
The (in)famous Exocet missile:
The BAP-100 we all know and love:
And on to the helicopters. TBC
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This one we all know intimately, don’t we? IRL it is tiny and I now have much more sympathy for it’s lack of inertia in DCS.
The ur-helicopter, this thing was actually used in operations. It was an unpowered autogyro towed aloft by U-boats for spotting.
If you thought the Sikorsky Defiant was anything new, look at this beautiful 1950s prototype:
It flew, but didn’t fly well, as there weren’t turbine engines yet to power it.
Look at that thing. It broke a record by flying to the amazing altitude of 2.5 meters (10 feet!) and a distance of well over one kilometer! The courage it must have taken to go full throttle on that, I can only imagine…
Not to be outdone, a few decades later this insane contraption was built to let one of these madmen prove his suicidal amount of courage.
Because France only buys things that look good.
@smokinhole, this ones’ for you:
A fairly successful garage built autogyro.
Time began to press in, so I quickly marched through the Normandy-Niemen memorial display.
A YaK-3.
The remains of a YaK-9. Note the bits of wood that had a significant structural role.
The gift shop was extensive and expensive. I bought the kids a 1/144 Concorde kit and a 100 piece puzzle for the price of a DCS Tomcat. But that’s ok, I don’t mind sponsoring such an amazing museum.
I have but one pic of the first hall, the old Le Breguet arrivals/departures building where they display the pre-1914 aviation displays. I don’t take pictures for me, and only thought of you lot in the prototype hall…
I skipped the space hall and the interwar hall due to time constraints. So I will have reason to return some day
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The Fighter Collection, that owns ED, has that as its logo. The TFC website seems to be down, but the Flying Legends is up.
https://www.flyinglegends.com/
Awesome museum! Thanks for the pics.
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Awesome pictures my friend!
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Wooow!
Thanks for the great report, I spent quite some time reading, staring at the pictures (especially the transparent F1!!). Love the Concorde prototype, the Mirage 4000, and all the weird jet, rocket and helicopter prototypes.
And you sent me down a rabbithole with that question about why the Armée de l'Air bought the F-100.
From the wiki, the stats between the F-100 and Super Mystère B2 seem similar: the speed of the Super Sabre is slightly higher but the service ceiling of the SMB2 is slightly higher. The main difference seems to be the useful bomb load: the F-100 can carry about 50% more under the wings.
This leads me to suspect the F-100 was bought as a low altitude strike fighter and remained the light/medium strike mainstay for 20 years, while the Super Mystère was best used as a fighter/interceptor.
That seems to be confirmed by this blog, because in French service
- The F-100 replaced the Skyraider in 1958
- The F-100 was replaced by the Jaguar, when it left AdlA service in 1978
- In between, from 1968 to 1973, the F-100 was the only aerial refuelling capable fighter in the AdlA. Which made it very useful for the politically questionable bombing of very distant corners of the African continent. Even when there were cracks in the wings and it was limited to 4G for a few years until that was fixed.
I feel like it’s time for the French successor of our British Birds topic. But I’ll have to think on the list before I put it up for feedback.
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What a great tour…!
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