Dassault Rafaele

Completely designed, developed and manufactured in France, the Rafale multirole fighter jet has turned into one of the most successful Dassault products in the market of 4th Generation multirole fighter jets. In addition to the 128 examples currently in service with the French Air and Space Force and Navy Aviation, 225 other Rafales were sold to Croatia, Egypt, Greece, India, UAE and Qatar.

For years, French Navy Aviation and the Air and Space Force have been the two main operators of the multirole combat aircraft. The first had its first Navy variant, the Rafale M, put into operation in 2002 while the latter began operating its first Rafale Bs in 2006. Since that, they both have used these aircraft in combat during various anti-terrorist operations in Afghanistan, Libya, Mali, Chad, Syria and Iraq. In addition to that, their aircraft were used to bolster defense of NATO’s eastern borders during the recent war in Ukraine.

Starting his career in 2005 by the means of anonymously writing articles about the history of the Iranian Air Force for Iranian websites, Babak Taghvaee soon became an aviation journalist, book author, historian and photojournalist by publishing his articles in English and German aviation magazines such as AirForces Monthly and Combat Aircraft in 2008 and 2009 respectively. He then co-authored his first book about the Iranian Air Force in 2010. In 2011, he became one of two supervisors of the Iranian Air Force’s historical research project 'Historical Identity of IRIAF' to document the history of the force and to write books about the subject. In the same year, he was invited by one of the Iranian defence companies to work as civilian innovator and advisor of the Iranian Air Force’s aircraft upgrade projects while he was a student in two Iranian universities (as well as a journalist for several Iranian aviation magazines). Since 2013, he has written almost 100 articles, news reports and three books about the Iranian civil and military aviation industries and the Russian and Ukrainian Air Forces, as well as the air war against the ISIL in the British, French, Greek and Russian world’s leading military aviation magazines while he was living in exile.