According to Air & Cosmos, Qatar has sent a delegation to evaluate the Rafale in Istres. Qatar has already evaluated the Rafale earlier, and this could be seen as a renewed interest in the Rafale.
The intention is to replace the Mirage 2000-5EDA/DDA, formerly only capable of air-defense missions, but later assigned to air-to-ground missions (with GBU-12).
Picture credits to Paul Farley from US Navy
Let's not forget that it's another competition, and Rafale will have to deal with the Typhoon (evaluated in late 2011), and the F/A-18 E (already evaluated too).
This is not accurate. The Qatari evaluation of Typhoon in the UK was scheduled for April 2011, but was cancelled because the personnel involved on the Qatari side were all involved in the Libyan operations.
ReplyDeleteQatar has not yet rescheduled a Typhoon evaluation.