ACWS777 From Canada, joined Oct 2010, 98 posts, RR: 0 Posted (4 years 4 months 3 weeks 6 days 22 hours ago) and read 3002 times:
Hey everybody. This is my first post after reading this forum for many years finally decided to join and I'm loving. So I was reading the new issue of Airways Magazine and they wrote an article about the dassault mercure 100. My question is why wasn't this a popular aircraft anywhere in the world and the only operator being Air Inter.
Quoting ACWS777 (Thread starter): why wasn't this a popular aircraft anywhere in the world and the only operator being Air Inter.
The Mercure came out in the early 1970's, well after airlines around the world had acquired fleets of 727's, 737's, DC-9's, etc. and the airlines were happy with them. Also, the Mercure had a range of less than 1000 miles with a full payload. That was not acceptable for most airlines. It worked fine for Air Inter because they were a domestic French carrier and they didn't need a plane with a lot of range.
Dassault looked at creating a newer version but was unwilling to use the GE engine which was being developed because GE hadn't sold any at the time. That was the CFM-56.