On July 22, 2021, Thales Group announced that it had received a contract from the General Directorate of Armaments (Direction Générale de l'Armement - DGA) of the Ministry of the Armed Forces of France for the supply of 350 Ssogriop helmet-mounted target designation systems for equipping Dassault Rafale fighters of the French Air Force and Navy. The contract also includes the supply of 400 new wide-angle multifunctional indicators to replace the current indicators in the cabins of French Air Force and Navy fighter jets.
A pilot with the Thales Ssogriop helmet-mounted target designation system in the cockpit of a Dassault Rafale (c) DGA fighter
The Rafale fighters of the French Armed Forces should receive the Thales Ssogriop helmet-mounted target designation systems and new indicators as part of their planned refinement to the promising F4 standard, the commissioning of the Rafale F4 aircraft is planned from 2025.
Until now, the Rafale fighters of the French Armed Forces did not have helmet-mounted target designation systems, although their use on this aircraft was planned by Dassault Aviation from the moment of its creation. The history of choosing helmet-mounted systems for the French Rafale is very long and includes several "visits" with canceled projects for technical and financial reasons. In 2000-2004, the DGA held a competition to equip the Rafale F3 modification being created at that time with helmet-mounted sights with the participation of the Scorpion system proposed by the Thales group and the Sagem Gerfaut system. In 2004, the Sagem Gerfaut system was selected and a contract was issued for the supply of 336 of these helmet-mounted systems to equip the French Rafale. However, as a result, Sagem was never able to bring Gerfaut, these systems were delivered in a small number and in fact fighters were never operated with it, and since the beginning of the 2010s, Gerfaut has quietly disappeared from the list of equipment of the French Rafale.
All this has now forced the French to return to the modified Thales system of the Scorpion system. It was reported that the tests of the Thales Scorpion on the Rafale are being conducted at the flight test center of the French Air Force in Cazaux since the beginning of 2021.
The Thales Scorpion helmet-mounted target designation system was supplied to the US Air Force, where it is used on a certain number of modified Lockheed Martin F-16C/D Block 30/32 fighters, on modernized Republic A-10C attack aircraft and on AC-130"gunships" of the latest versions, and is also used on combat aircraft from a number of other customers (in particular, on EF-18A fighters of the Spanish Air Force, F-5E/F aircraft of the American private company Top Aces), as well as in the HiForce helicopter armament complex of Airbus Helicopters (ordered, in particular, by Hungary).
The Rafale fighters supplied to Qatar and India are equipped with the Targo II helmet-mounted target designation system of the Israeli company Elbit Systems.
Helmet-mounted target designation system Thales Scorpion (c) Thales
