Why did the Dassault Mercure 'fail'?

[Jet_A_Knight]

Dassault build (arguably) great biz jets.

What was wrong and right with the Mercure?

[NG_Kaptain]

The 737 beat it to the market and it was tailor made for Air Inter's routes, very much like how the 727 killed the Trident which was made to BEA's specs. And even the 707 vs the VC 10. Only lately has Airbus been able to beat Boeing on the market place.

[alangirvan]

It was underpowered. Only able to go about 400miles/700km. That is why the CFM56 was invented.

[Boss Raptor]

It had awful range and performance

The aircraft was designed as a short range airliner - it has a max payload range of only 400 miles. With 80% payload, the range is still only 900 miles. Even worse, in the quest to reduce the structural weight the objective was achieved by excluding all structural provision for supplementary fuel capacity. The design had no possibility of model development or growth!

The French government provided a loan for 56% of the development costs. The loan was to be repaid from a levy on sales. Dassault only covered 14% of the costs out of their own pocket, the rest came from Fiat (10%), SABCA in Belgium, CASA in Spain and the Swiss Federal Aircraft Factory.

Very pretty plane though...

(could be said that Dassaults' bizjets are made without interference and constraints from govt. departments and state procurement, remember Air Inter was shared by the govt. and SNCF French Railways for many years)

[Bre901]

I used to fly it as a pax in the early 80s.
It had a reputation of a very manouverable (sp?) aircraft.
The bank angles and especially roll rates seemed higher than usually experienced on airliners, especially on some ORY-GNB flights, with westerly condition (approaches to RWY27).

There was a saying that some IT pilots were somehow excited being able to hold the yoke of a Dassault airplane "La chasse b.....l !" :p