It is just about impossible to consider the Nord 1500 Griffon as a regular fighter plane merely because it belongs to the category of volatile and bold experiments of this kind. This was, in fact, the ultimate range of the French hypothesis of speed and machine innovation that the Griffon forgave them in the first half of the 1950s. The plane was the only “manned aircraft that didn’t matter for war, but it checked out how much beyond Mach 2 ramjet technology can go and how far it can be extended.
The tale unfolds when the French government in 1953 launched a program to study advanced wing designs by commissioning the construction of two experimental aircraft, both delta and swept wing configurations being under consideration at that time. To collect the needed data, the Arsenal de l’Aéronautique—soon SFECMAS—decided to start with a wooden glider, the Arsenal 1301.
The glider could be modified with various wing types and small canards that made it a flying laboratory for testing new ideas. The Arsenal 1301 has already been used to gather data, and from the findings, three different interceptor programs, 1400, 1500, and 1910, have emerged. The 1400 is the Nord Gerfaut, the 1500 has turned out to be Griffon, and the 1910 is only an idea.
One of the peculiar things about the Griffon was its weird twin-engine combination. The complicated but brilliant combination of a normal turbojet and a ramjet was what gave the aircraft the ability. The blast from the SNECMA Atar 101G turbojet was enough to get the ramjet rolling.
Ramjets don’t generate thrust at zero; they’re dependent on high speed, usually more than 1,000 km/h, for the air to be taken in, compressed, and maintained by the fire. The Griffon ramjet, the Nord Stato-Réacteur, once energized, was capable of carrying the airplane over Mach 2.
It was not just to flaunt this double-engine design got its place, but it also met a technical difficulty smartly. Ramjets have no compressors or turbines; they are solely dependent on the aircraft’s movement through the air to provide the air to be compressed. At low speeds, they are of no use except when they are paired with another engine, but the turbojet of the Griffon made combining them possible.
The airframe was mainly strong enough to handle supersonic flight, but a lack of today’s high-tech heat-resistant materials was still felt. At top speeds, it suffered the harshest of thermal stresses, and the intermediate speeds could make the ramjet act up.
As a matter of fact, the Griffon performed outstandingly: the date of its first flight was 20 September 1955, and, by 1959, it managed to set a record for world closed-course speed at Mach 2.19.
Nevertheless, its achievements could not prevent it from being overshadowed by less complicated and more practical designs. The Mirage III by Dassault turned out that conventional turbojets without the dual-engine system’s difficulties could reach performances very close to those of the Griffon. There were only ever two Griffons built, and then it was decided to shelve the project.
The second, as a prototype, is the French Air and Space Museum in Le Bourget, which is located there, a very concrete witness to the period when curiosity, bravery, and trial by error were taking the air revolution even further.
The Griffon’s real fame is in the watchwords it instilled. Its research helped in learning the high-speed flight and engine technologies, which are now used in later fighter jets and ramjet missiles. The development of ramjets was mainly in missiles, but the Griffon is the jarring instance of the epoch when the daring notion pushed the technology beyond the limit of reach by even the most optimistic.
