The little jet that taught a generation

What makes the Magister special

Full specifications

Baseline note: the figures below describe the CM.170-1 Magister as built in France from 1956 — two Turbomeca Marboré IIA turbojets of 400 kgf apiece, tip tanks as standard equipment, and no ejection seats. It is the right baseline because it is the aeroplane NATO’s Air Training Advisory Group chose in 1954 after comparing twenty-four candidate trainers, the aeroplane Belgium, West Germany, Finland and Israel first bought and then built, and the aeroplane that went to war over Sinai, the West Bank and Katanga. Deltas for the CM.170-2 with Marboré VI engines, the navalised CM.175 Zéphyr, the Israeli IAI Tzukit rebuild and the licence-built German, Finnish and Israeli aircraft are in grey. Three cautions before the numbers. First, production. No two authorities agree: the standard English reference gives 868 in its data panel (576 French, 194 German, 62 Finnish, 36 Israeli) and 898 in its own variants list (761 CM.170-1 plus 137 CM.170-2); the warbird literature says 918; French and Israeli accounts say 929. The Israeli licence figure alone appears as 36, 50 and 80 in three respectable places. "Roughly 900" is the only total that can be stated without a footnote. Second, the engine of the CM.170-2. English-language prose repeatedly calls it the Marboré IV; the same article’s variants list, the French account, the Hebrew account and Turbomeca’s own family designations all say Marboré VI of 480 kgf. The VI is correct, and French sources supply the detail the others omit: it came in at production aircraft number 405. Third, the type changed under one designation. Powered aileron servos arrived at aircraft number 165 because high-speed roll control was heavy; the bigger engine arrived at 405; ejection seats never arrived at all. A "Magister specification" is therefore always a snapshot of one block of one production run.

Armament & payload

The Magister carried two rifle-calibre machine guns and 140 kg of stores, and four air forces sent it against tanks anyway

The Magister’s armament is the armament of a training aeroplane that was sold with a war-fighting option box ticked, and it never became anything more. Two 7.5 mm MAC 52 machine guns in the nose with 200 rounds each, one hardpoint under each wing, and a total external load of 140 kg (310 lb) — two 50 kg bombs, or eight to ten unguided rockets, or a pair of Nord SS.11 wire-guided anti-tank missiles. That is the whole of it. There is no radar, no ranging, no gyro-computing sight worth the name, no ability to carry a stores load that would trouble a jeep. What the aeroplane brought to the battlefield was not firepower but availability: every air force that trained on it already owned dozens, the pilots were instructors and reservists who were already current, and it could fly from a grass strip a few minutes behind the line. Gun calibre, ammunition and pylon fits varied by operator — France went to 7.62 mm NATO, Israel fitted 0.30-in Brownings, Katanga bolted on locally made bombs, and the Zéphyr usually flew with the guns removed altogether.

The Israeli case is the one that matters, and it is the reason the Magister has a combat reputation at all. In 1964 the Israeli flight school at Hatzerim quietly organised its instructors and reservists into a war-mobilisation squadron. When the plan for June 1967 emerged, it became clear that the ground assault on the Egyptian positions at Rafah would open on the first morning at exactly the hour every capable Israeli combat aircraft was committed to Operation Focus against Arab airfields. The air force commander asked for the ground attack to be delayed; the army refused; and so 44 or 45 armed Magisters of the re-formed 147 Squadron — two Brownings, rocket pods, light bombs — became the entire close air support available to the Israeli army on the opening day of the war. Their first sortie was not an attack at all but a deception: routine-looking four-ships taking off into the morning while the strike force ran silent towards Egypt.

What followed was effective and very expensive. Over roughly 400 operational sorties flown by 42 pilots and one navigator, the Magisters hit Rafah, Khan Yunis and the Gaza border positions on the first day, were switched to the Jordanian front on the second when the Egyptian battle moved out of their reach, worked Jordanian and Iraqi armour on the Jerusalem to Jericho axis and in north-western Samaria, and flew a final abortive detachment to Ramat David for the Golan. Israeli accounts credit them with more than 50 tanks and more than 70 other armoured vehicles, and with helping to blunt the Jordanian armoured thrust towards Jerusalem. Four pilots were killed on the first day alone. Because so many aircraft were hit by small-arms fire on day one, the squadron was ordered to attack from higher altitude on day two, and on day five the squadron commander was shot down on the very first Syrian-front sortie and the mission was abandoned. The loss figure is the one point where the sources part company: Israeli air force histories say six aircraft and six pilots, Shlomo Aloni’s account and the French literature say seven aircraft. Either way it is the highest proportional loss rate of any Israeli squadron in the war. Two pilots, squadron commander Arie Ben-Or and Captain Yaakov Morgan, received decorations later converted to the Medal of Courage. The squadron was disbanded when the war ended and the Magister was never sent to war by Israel again.

Sourcing caveat: no operator has released Magister loading tables, and the stores described here are reconstructed from the 1954 Flight International assessment, Jane’s entries of 1955 to 1966, and national squadron narratives. Israeli sortie and loss totals come from Israeli Air Force heritage material and from Shlomo Aloni’s Air Enthusiast study, which disagree by one airframe; the tank and vehicle claims are Israeli claims and have never been independently audited. Katangese details rest on Flight International’s April 1961 report and on Christopher Othen’s history of the secession. One popular French claim — that Israeli Magisters were fitted with ejection seats shortly before the Six-Day War — should be treated as wrong: Israeli accounts cite the absence of ejection seats as one of the specific reasons operational use of the type was ended after the war.

Variants

Fouga built the world’s first purpose-designed jet trainer to reach mass production, and settled its strangest argument with a prototype that could wear either tail

The butterfly tail is the first thing anybody says about the Magister and the last thing most accounts explain. Fouga was a small subcontractor that built sailplanes, and its jet work began in 1949 by hanging a 100 kgf Turbomeca Piméné on a glider airframe. The V-tail came from that lineage — from the CM.8 series of jet-glider testbeds — and it was kept for four reasons that all point the same way. Two surfaces are lighter and produce less wetted area and less interference drag than three, which matters enormously on an aeroplane with 800 kgf of thrust in total. The tail sits clear of the jet efflux, which on a design with the engines buried in the wing roots and exhausting either side of the rear fuselage is not a convenience but a requirement. The slim rear fuselage offered nowhere sensible to root a fin of adequate area. And in an aeroplane with no ejection seats, a crew abandoning it over the side had a clear path aft instead of a tailplane at head height — a point the Israeli literature makes explicitly and the French literature does not.

It cost something, and Fouga knew it. The butterfly tail couples pitch and yaw: apply rudder and the aeroplane rolls the wrong way, because the ruddervators generate a side force above the centre of gravity. Fouga’s fix was a ventral keel under the rear fuselage, added on the third prototype in February 1953 and carried by every production Magister, which restores directional behaviour and doubles as a spin-recovery aid and a bumper wheel for heavy landings. There was also a political cost. After the fatal crash of the CM.71 and the loss of the first Magister prototype on 3 November 1952, which killed the pilot Georges Lequien and the flight test engineer Jean Chatain, the French press openly questioned whether the butterfly tail was safe at all. Fouga answered it in the most direct way available: prototype 02, first flown on 6 July 1953, was built so that it could fly with either a conventional cruciform tail or the V, and the comparison was run. The conventional tail was found aerodynamically inferior at the higher end of the speed range. The V stayed, and no subsequent Fouga design abandoned it.

The rest of the story is a small company being right at the right moment. The Armée de l’air ordered prototypes in December 1950, chose the type over Morane-Saulnier’s MS.755 Fleuret in October 1953, and in 1954 NATO’s Air Training Advisory Group compared twenty-four trainers and named the Magister the aircraft best suited to carry a pupil from the beginning of training to the end of it. That endorsement is what turned a French order into a world type. Trials at Mont-de-Marsan in 1955 showed that students taught ab initio on the Magister reached solo on a single-seat fighter in 170 flying hours against 220 by the old mixed piston-then-jet route, and that an air force could therefore stop maintaining two training fleets. Production was split across Morane-Saulnier at Ossun, Fouga at Aire-sur-l’Adour and Latécoère at Toulouse, with final assembly at Toulouse-Blagnac, and export orders were deliberately given priority over French ones so that foreign customers could buy straight off the line.

And then a basic trainer with two machine guns went to more wars than most fighters. Belgian Magisters flew attack sorties from Kamina during the Congo crisis in the summer of 1960. Katanga ordered nine, received three by way of a CIA front company, armed one, and used it against United Nations peacekeepers with an effect out of all proportion to its size — and a Katangese Magister is still the leading candidate in the sixty-year argument over whether Dag Hammarskjöld’s DC-6 was shot down near Ndola on 18 September 1961. Israel sent 44 of them against Egyptian and Jordanian armour in 1967. Morocco used them against Algeria in the 1963 Sand War and against the Polisario in the Western Sahara until losses forced them out of combat in the 1980s. El Salvador flew nine ex-Israeli and three French aircraft through the civil war of the 1980s alongside its Ouragans and A-37Bs, losing none to enemy fire but finishing the war with only five serviceable. El Salvador is also the subject of a persistent error: the Magister took no part in the 1969 Football War with Honduras. The Salvadoran air force bought its first jets of any kind in 1974, five years afterwards; the 1969 air war was fought with P-51 Mustangs, F4U Corsairs, T-28s and converted C-47s, and is remembered precisely because it was the last time piston-engined fighters fought each other. Cambodia armed its four. What was left of Katanga’s aircraft was absorbed into the Congolese air force when the secession collapsed in January 1963. Meanwhile the same aeroplane spent sixteen years as the mount of the Patrouille de France, from 1964 to 1980, flew for the Belgian Red Devils, the Irish Silver Swallows, the Brazilian Esquadrilha da Fumaça and the Israeli air force display team, and taught the pilots of more than twenty air forces to fly. Very few aircraft have led two lives that far apart.

CM.130.R (1949–1950, none built)

The design that was rejected. A tandem two-seat jet trainer on two 100 kgf Turbomeca Palas, offered to the Armée de l’air as a replacement for the piston Morane-Saulnier MS.475 Vanneau and turned down as hopelessly underpowered. Fouga enlarged the airframe around the coming 400 kgf Marboré and kept the glider-derived butterfly tail. Everything that made the Magister a success followed from that one rejection.

CM.170.R prototypes and pre-production (1952–1955, 3 prototypes plus 10)

Prototype 01 flew at Mont-de-Marsan on 23 July 1952 with Léon Bourriau, unpressurised, unarmed and without tip tanks, and was lost with both crew on 3 November 1952. Prototype 03 added the ventral keel. Prototype 02, the important one, could be flown with either a conventional cruciform tail or the V, and carried the first periscope in February 1954. Ten pre-production aircraft followed and were complete by October 1955. Production aircraft were, unusually for the period, almost identical to the prototypes.

CM.170-1 Magister (1956–1962, about 761 including licence production)

The definitive first mark, with Marboré IIA engines. Two 7.5 mm guns, two pylons, pressurised cockpit, no ejection seats. Powered aileron servos from aircraft No. 165. This is the aeroplane in almost every published specification and the aeroplane that fought in Katanga and Sinai. Also designated CM.170R in early French and Belgian service.

CM.170-2 Magister (1960–1967, 137 or 544 depending on whose count you take)

Marboré VI engines of 480 kgf and revised radio, introduced at production aircraft No. 405. The count is a genuine mess: English sources say 137 built as new, French sources say 544 aircraft carried the standard once re-engining is included, and the two are probably counting different things. Brazil designated its aircraft T-24. French production ended in 1962; Finnish licence production continued to 1967.

CM.170M Esquif and CM.175 Zéphyr (1956–1994, 2 prototypes plus 30)

The navalised Magister for the Aéronavale. Arrester hook, catapult attachments, strengthened structure and undercarriage, nose light, and — because it had no ejection seats — sliding canopies that could be locked open for launch and recovery. First flight 31 July 1956 as the CM.170M Esquif; deck trials from HMS Eagle and HMS Bulwark in August 1957 and March 1958; first production aircraft 30 May 1959; into service October 1959 with 59S, the deck-landing school at Hyères, which flew fourteen at a time and rotated the rest through storage to even out the hours. It formed its own display team, the Patrouille de Voltige d’Hyères, in 1962, and served until 1994 — the longest career of any Magister variant anywhere.

Flugzeug-Union Süd licence production, West Germany (1958–1961, 250 in all)

The first and largest export customer. Sixty-two aircraft came from Fouga, twenty-two were assembled in Germany from French-supplied parts, and the remaining 166 were built outright by Flugzeug-Union Süd, the Heinkel and Messerschmitt consortium — the first military aircraft the two firms built after the war. The Luftwaffe took the bulk and the Bundesmarine about fifteen. Germany retired them early and sold them on, which is how Algeria, Bangladesh, Lebanon, Gabon and Togo came to operate Magisters at all.

Valmet licence production, Finland (1958–1967, 18 bought plus 62 built)

Eighteen French-built aircraft as FM-1 to FM-18 and sixty-two Valmet-built as FM-21 to FM-82. Finland assigned them a wartime secondary attack role because the 1947 peace treaty capped the number of aircraft it could class as bombers. They served as the Finnish Air Force’s jet trainer from 1958 until 1988, when the BAe Hawk replaced them; twenty-one were lost in accidents, six of them fatal. Finnish crews called the type Kukkopilli, the ocarina, after the Marboré’s whistle.

IAI licence production, Israel (1959–1964, 50 built)

The deal Israel actually wanted was the licence, not the aeroplane: Bedek Aviation, soon to become Israel Aircraft Industries, was looking for a way to stop being a repair shop and start being a manufacturer, and Al Schwimmer negotiated accordingly in 1957. The first Israeli-assembled aircraft was handed over on 6 July 1960 in a ceremony at which David Ben-Gurion named the type Snunit, swallow. The first twelve came from French kits; from the thirteenth the parts were made in Israel, some redesigned in aluminium and glass fibre. Production stopped in 1964 because surplus ex-Luftwaffe airframes had become cheaper than building new ones; Israel bought about 65 from Germany and 25 from France instead, and around 125 Magisters passed through its flying school.

IAI Tzukit and the AMIT Fouga (1980–2010, about 80 rebuilt)

Not a variant so much as a second life. Structural fatigue appeared at the end of the 1970s; Israel costed replacement against rebuilding and chose rebuilding. IAI made over 250 modifications — Marboré VI engines, automatic engine start, cockpits reworked to resemble the American aircraft students would graduate to, new seats, and a fault-simulation system the instructor could trigger from the back. First flight September 1980, first delivery 1983, last delivered November 1986; the programme won IAI the Kaplan Prize. An export version, the AMIT, was offered and attracted no orders.

CM.171 Makalu, CM.173 Super Magister, Potez CM.191 and Fouga 90 (1957–1978, one or two of each)

The developments that went nowhere. The CM.171 Makalu was an enlarged airframe on two 1,100 kgf Turbomeca Gabizos, and its only prototype was lost on 20 March 1957. The CM.173 Super Magister, also called the Potez 94, had Marboré Super VI engines and, at last, ejection seats; the single prototype survives in the reserve collection of the Musée de l’Air. The Potez CM.191 was a four-seat Magister, two prototypes. The Fouga 90 of 1978 was the serious attempt at a successor — Turbomeca Astafan turbofans of 690 kgf, a raised rear seat under a reshaped canopy, ejection seats, modern avionics — and it flew on 20 August 1978 into a market that had already chosen the Alpha Jet. No orders.

Closing note on retirement and survivors. The Magister is retired as a military type everywhere, and the last dates are worth stating precisely because they are so often got wrong. France retired its last Magisters in 1996 after forty years and 397 aircraft; the Aéronavale gave up the Zéphyr in 1994; Finland finished in 1988; Ireland withdrew its six — four bought second-hand from Austria and two that had been seized in transit to Katanga in 1961 and never reached it — by 1999, leaving the state with no jet aircraft at all. Belgium held on longest, keeping a handful as continuation-training hacks for senior officers until the last flights in 2007, with formal withdrawal not recorded until January 2017. Israel retired the Tzukit at a ceremony at Hatzerim on 22 June 2010, exactly fifty years after Ben-Gurion named the first one, the Beechcraft T-6A Texan II having arrived there on 9 July 2009; the frequently repeated claim that the Tzukit soldiered on to about 2018 is wrong. As for survivors, there is no worldwide census and the honest answer is a range. Every survivor is an original airframe: no Magister reproduction has ever been built, and there would be no point in building one. Scores sit in museums and on plinths across the twenty-odd countries that flew the type — the Israeli Air Force Museum at Hatzerim, the Finnish Air Force Museum, the Irish Air Corps Museum at Baldonnel, the Musée de l’Air, Belgian and German collections — and the Katangese connection means one of the most historically loaded Magisters of all is simply a wreck-file entry. The civil fleet is the surprise. Warbird Alley counted over 50 Magisters on civil registers in the United States, New Zealand and Britain with at least 40 airworthy; the American register alone listed 84 in September 2012, making the Magister the third most numerous ex-military jet type in United States civil hands. Two engines, docile handling, tiny fuel burn by jet-warbird standards and a large stock of Marboré spares from the J69 programme make it the cheapest realistic way for a private owner to fly a jet. France, which built it, restricts civil registration of the type, so the Magister is commonest as a civil aeroplane everywhere except at home — though the Patrouille Tranchant at Rennes has flown a five-ship civil display team on them.

From glider firm to global classroom

Twelve stories of the Fouga Magister

The Magister in pictures

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The Magister in motion

A dedicated Fouga Magister video is coming soon to this page. In the meantime, explore the gallery above and the twelve stories for the full picture of the butterfly-tailed trainer — from its 1952 first flight to its second life as a warbird.

The Fouga Magister in motion

Wings Over the Rockies Air & Space Museum — one of the most-watched Fouga Magister films on YouTube.

Where the Magister flew

The trainer that went to war

The Magister was built to teach, not to fight — but with guns in the nose and bombs under the wings it became a light-attack aircraft for air forces that had nothing else. Its most intense day of combat came in June 1967, when Israeli Fougas struck armour in the Six-Day War; it also saw action over the Congo, the Western Sahara and El Salvador. Slow and lightly built, it was always vulnerable to ground fire, and casualties could be heavy.

Compare the combat record of every military aircraft. Figures as of July 2026.

Everything people ask about the Fouga Magister

Continue the tour

Every fact, checked

• Military Factory — Fouga CM.170 MagisterSpecifications, variants, production figures and operator list.
• GlobalMilitary.net — CM.170 MagisterOperator roster and training-aircraft history.
• Pima Air & Space MuseumDevelopment background and the V-tail glider heritage.
• Palm Springs Air Museum — Warbird WednesdayDesign, engines and warbird-era context.
• Valiant Air Command Warbird MuseumReference on preserved airframes and operations.
• Minijets — Fouga en AfriqueAfrican operators, Katanga and light-attack use.
• FAI records databaseReference for period performance classifications.
• National Museum of the US Air ForceGeneral reference for jet-trainer development of the era.