Thank you all, trying to digest all this.
I'm better at aircrafts than ships. I wonder if Foch and Clemenceau could support Buccaneers - if Victorious or Hermes can, may be its a possibility. What is sure is that the Buccaneer was 200% better strike aircraft than Etendard IV !
I think the French would want the S2 variant with the Spey, and there things goes very interesting.
In 1959 SNECMA had an agreement with Pratt&Whitney to build J-75s under licence for a scaled up Mirage IV-A, the IV-B that was never build. Competing were the Gyron, Olympus and yes, the PS.13 Iroquois.
Later SNECMA used that agreement to build the TF-30 under licence for the VSTOL Mirage III-V.
But in 1959, SNECMA might as well turn toward Rolls and licence-build the Spey (just as Allison did with the TF-41)
Those engines would power French Buccaneers S2. A Bucc in Aeronanavale markings would look awesome.
The main issue is the fleet defense aircraft - the French went for the Crusader, the RN was much more ambitious (I'll try to check my Tony Butler books in the future)
To me the 1958 defence cuts seem to be the French equivalent to the British 1957 Defence Review. That is we can't afford to maintain a large and modern army in Europe supported by an equally large and modern tactical air force. Therefore we are going to disband most of both and maintain peace with the USSR through nuclear deterrence. The surviving conventional forces will be restructured to fight guerrilla wars in the third world, with the aim of stopping small wars escalating into the big one.
In addition to cancelling PA58 the French Government cancelled or cut back most of its aviation projects, exactly like Duncan Sandys did. However, the French project that was too far advanced to cancel was Mirage III.
Yes and no. No obsessions with SAMs as pilotless interceptors in France (AFAIK). Nothing as brutal as Sandys-storm - I mean that the Mirage III was never threatened, what was cut was a) Armée de l'Air Etendard IV low-level interceptors b) Leduc and Trident high altitude interceptors c) Vautours all weather interceptors. The Mirage III killed them all.
Most importantly, state-owned aircraft companies were told to focuse on anything but combat aircrafts - Dassault doing that job better, at lower cost.
De Gaulle did sacrifice a lot of things to pay for the Force de Frappe, but never shut down manned interceptors like Sandys did.
But the Armée de l'Air was certainly on the edge - stuck between NATO, Algeria and Force de Frappe. Damn it, they used 200-miles-per-hour
T-6 Harvards as counter-insurgency aircrafts in Algeria while 1500-miles-per-hour prototype Mirages were flying.
I agree that PA58 might have been able to operate Phantom class aircraft, because after I got up this morning I read the Conway's entry on PA58. According to them PA58 was to have had a pair of 75m (or about 225ft) steam catapults, which were longer than the 199ft units fitted to Ark Royal when she was "Phantomised."
Interesting. The Clem's only had 50-m long catapults and were unable to handle Phantoms, just like Victorious, Hermes or Essex of similar sizes. Ok, the French Navy could rework Clemenceau and Foch into attack carriers (CVA), with only Buccaneer on the decks, leaving Phantoms for Verdun. But I don't think the French Navy could accept that - its a kind of USN luxury they can't afford (by the way, what air cover when Verdun is in refit ?)
As an aside I doubt that Mirage IVM would have entered service with the Aeronavale had PA58 been built because I suspect that its landing speed would have been too high. I also suspect that the landing speed of the proposed Mirage IIIM was too high for Clemeceau and Foch, which led to American Crusaders being purchased instead and the development of the Mirage G.
It was not the same Mirage IV - not the IVA that flew in 1959. To make a long story short, the Mirage IV was born in 1956 as the III bigger brother, and until 1959 it was
a fast moving project.
2 ATAR 9 de 6000 kgp
Envergure : 11.75 m
Longueur: 19.35 m (16.30 m replié)
Hauteur: 5.30 m (5 m replié)
Surface alaire: 70 m2
Poids à vide équipé: 9.5 t
Poids maximum de catapultage: 16.5 t
Poids à l’appontage: de 9.7 à 10.5 t
Mach max: 2
Plafond: 20500 m
Temps de montée à 12000 m : 1’57
Not too far from a Rafale M, but of course without fly-by-wire (and canards)
The Mirage III delta wing was a major obstacle, but Dassault proposed a tailed delta variant, without much success. The Mirage G come a decade later, in 1968.
As for the Crusaders, the French Navy was unable to choose between manned interceptors and missile frigates. So the story goes that it went up, to De Gaulle himself in 1962. Not a sailor by any way, he turned toward the only sailor in his entourage - his son Philippe. Phillipe De Gaulle came with a solution: pay for 42 Crusaders by cancelling a missile frigate (the French navy wanted five of them, with MASURCA and Tartar SAMs).
