Atlas Carver

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The Atlas Carver was a project launched in the 1980s by the South African Atlas Aircraft Corporation to replace the ageing Canberra, Buccaneer, and Mirage III in the South African Air Force. The Atlas Cheetah was a total upgrade of the Mirage III, but it was only an interim solution until the late 90's when the Carver would have entered into service. The project was necessated by the arms embargo imposed by United Nations Security Council Resolution 418 against Apartheid South Africa of the time.

President Frederik Willem de Klerk mentioned its cancellation in parliament along with the six nuclear weapons in the early 1990s. Upwards of 10 billion Rand had been spent on the project already as well as a mock-up to test systems placement. Comprehensive wind tunnel tests and a host of related work had been completed. Apparently construction of a prototype had either commenced or was about to commence.^{[citation needed]} In 1987, towards the end of the research and test phase, some Israeli engineers made redundant by the Lavi cancellation were recruited onto the Carver project, leading to speculation that it would be a Lavi lookalike, ala the J-10.^{[citation needed]}

The design was to be a fly by wire (FBW) unstable design constructed from a large percentage of composites. There is evidence that the "Advanced Composite Evaluator" (ACE) constructed by Atlas/Denel in the late 1980s or early 1990s was part of the research and development into aircraft composites. The ACE was a turboprop trainer in the class of the Pilatus PC-9 or Tucano. At the time, it had the highest percentage of composites of any military type aircraft in the world and even had some stealth capability.^{[citation needed]}