On this day, in 1949, the MD 450 Ouragan made its first flight at Melun-Villaroche, piloted by Constantin “Kostia” Rozanoff.
This aircraft’s first drawings came out in October 1947. On December 30, Marcel Dassault signed the first contract to design, build and deliver three interceptor fighter planes. The prototype’s construction began on April 7, 1948, only six months after the first sketches were put on paper.
Reviving the standards of the Bloch aircraft from the years just before the war, and drawing on experience gained on the MB 150 series of fighters and its derivatives, the small Dassault team designed the simplest airframe possible: a small aircraft, light, inexpensive and as effective as the engine would allow.
The satisfactory results from tests at the State’s flight test center led air authorities to order 12 pre-production aircraft on August 31, 1949. That way, they could count on a large enough fleet to fine-tune the operational aspects, which included carrying and delivering air-to-air and air-to-ground weapons, and running the Air Force’s various trials. The contract was signed on 15 December 1949. Those aircraft were produced in Dassault’s plants outside Paris, and to assess the scale of jet-powered aviation.