The Nord 1500 Griffon is one of those very odd airplanes that are more like a cutting-edge testbed than an actual fighter plane. France was anxious to be first in speed and engine technology in the early 1950s, and the Griffon was their means. It was not meant to fly—it was meant to pull, to drive it up to as high a speed as it would go above Mach 2, and how far ramjet technology could be extended on a manned machine.
The roots go back to 1953, when the French government showed that they were required to build two research airplanes. It was just a component of a general plan of research into more complex winged aircraft, such as delta and swept wings. In an attempt to gather the information, Arsenal de l’Aéronautique—later organized as SFECMAS—made use of a wood glider named the Arsenal 1301.
It would have numerous different wing arrangements and tiny canards and would be used as an air testbed for concepts. They were enveloped by the three interceptor projects: the 1400, the 1500, and the ambitious 1910. While the 1400 went on to become the Nord Gerfaut and the 1500 the Griffon, the 1910 was purely a paper concept.
It was Griffon’s revolutionary twin-engine design that distinguished it. It used a conventional turbojet and a ramjet, an ingenious but ugly compromise. SNECMA Atar 101G turbojet gave the aircraft sufficient power to fly fast enough and get there quickly enough so that the ramjet would pick up the pace.
Ramjets cannot be fired from standstill like conventional jets—instead, they require speed, normally more than 1,000 km/h, to operate. During the firing stage, the Griffon ramjet, the Nord Stato-Réacteur, would propel the aircraft to more than Mach 2.
The design was not an ego excursion—instead, it was a prudent solution to a knotty problem. Ramjets have no hardware in the form of compressors and turbines; they just utilize the aircraft’s forward motion to compress incoming air, ram compression. High speed is enough to provide airflow for an engine to sustain combustion. Low speed? Ramjets are almost obsolete except for a second engine. The Griffon neatened all this with a bridge between both systems.
The plane itself was rugged too, supersonic-stress-rated, but only to that extent. Without heat-resistant materials now issued as standard, the Griffon received a pitiless thermal thrashing at high speeds. The ramjet was finicky at mid-range speeds as well, inefficient, or on the fritz. But despite all this, the plane did have some downright fantastic aerobatic maneuvers. Its first flight was on 20 September 1955, and in 195,9 it won a closed-course world speed record at Mach 2.19.
Despite all its success, the Griffon was ultimately superseded by more rational, less complicated designs. The less-expensive and more basic Dassault Mirage III interceptor proved that old-fashioned turbojets were quite able to deliver the performance without double-engine flash. Two Griffons were actually built, and the project was ultimately canceled.
The second model survives to the present in the French Air and Space Museum at Le Bourget, handy to an age of test and development when airframe shape was.
The true worth of Griffon was its writing. It was a perceptive and well-considered commentary on high-speed flight and engine evolution, which translated into interceptors and ramjet-guided missile design in the years to follow. Ramjets later found their best application in missiles, but Griffon is an excellent example of the results of curiosity, imagination, and risk-taking leading to innovation.
Its background shows how sometimes the most unexpected concepts turn out to have the greatest enduring influence—whether they ever evolve into tradition or not.
