Issue 351: Meet the Falcons

Today Dassault is keenly watching a new government requirement to replace the RAAF’s current VIP fleet (of two Boeing BBJs and three Bombardier Challenger 604s), for which, depending on the exact requirement, the Falcon 7X or 8X could be contenders. But Australia is also an important, albeit small market for the Dassault Falcon range, with nine Falcons currently on the Australian civil aircraft register operated by private companies and charter operators. Those nine aircraft – one Falcon 7X, two Falcon 900s, two Falcon 2000s, two Falcon 50s and two Falcon/Mystere 20s – represent just a small fraction of the 2,210 Dassault Falcons in service worldwide (65 per cent, around 1,370 aircraft are in North America alone), but together with a Falcon 900 operated for the PNG Government by Air Niugini and a US-registered Falcon 900 based in Auckland, the local Dassault Falcon fleet is only second to China’s for size in the Asia Pacific at the moment.

For Dassault the Asia Pacific region presents as a potentially significant upside for future sales, given the region’s economic growth and China in particular opening up to private aviation. Overall there are currently 100 Falcons in Asia Pacific, a number growing by five to 10 aircraft a year. And indeed China is already home to more Falcon 7Xs than any other country outside the USA, with 20 based in Beijing alone, and the company sees even greater potential for its new Falcon 8X. Based on the 7X, the 8X, which entered service in October 2017, has a range with eight passengers of 6,450nm, placing it firmly in the ultra long-range category.

For now Dassault is keeping tight- lipped about the prospects of seeing its Falcon 8X in Australia amid what director of sales for South East Asia and Australasia Didier Raynard says is strong demand for the latest generation trijet. The Falcon 8X made its first appearance in Australia in February 2017, when it was displayed at the Avalon Airshow.

The first aircraft was delivered to launch customer Europe-based Amjet Executive in October 2016 and the type is now operating in Europe, North America, Africa and Asia. But not Australia.

Asked at the recently concluded Paris Airshow whether Dassault had sold a Falcon 8X into Australia, all Raynard would say was: “We haven’t delivered an 8X into Australia yet.”

Pressed further about sales rather than deliveries, the Dassault executive said: “I’m not going to comment.”

However, Raynard said there was strong interest in the aircraft around the world, pointing to the roughly current 18-month lead time from ordering the 8X to delivery. That is, a customer who put pen to paper for an 8X now would pick up the keys either in late 2018 or early 2019.

“It’s a very good sign for the company. It’s a very good sign for the product itself because it shows that it was really worth waiting for,” Raynard told Australian Aviation during the airshow.

“We see strong demand. We are not going to complain about it.”

For customers in a hurry to secure a new aircraft, sourcing a second hand aircraft as an interim solution was always an option, Raynard noted. “When we have clients that are really really in a hurry to get the aircraft we always find a solution. We can find a solution with an interim aircraft for them to wait for their new aircraft to come in.”

Dassault is also keen to have the 8X play a role in the potential replacement of the government’s VIP fleet. In May 2017, Defence said it had completed a tender evaluation process as part of a plan to replace the VIP transport service operated by the RAAF from mid-2019 and intended to enter into contract negotiations with a preferred tenderer for the role of managing contractor.

The managing contractor would manage the establishment, delivery and long-term sustainment of the new service on behalf of the Commonwealth.

Dassault Falcon Asia Pacific president Jean Michel Jacob said the 8X was ideally suited for a variety of tasks, with the aircraft capable of going everywhere with a short response time, including into remote areas with short runways or unprepared airstrips yet with sufficient range for longer journeys.

“We think that our Falcons, especially the 7X or 8X, are extremely well adapted for this multi-mission purpose,” Jacob told Australian Aviation at the Paris Airshow.

“My view of the Australian market is we first have to keep on promoting our Falcon to private customers and the big corporations that are there.

“We also promote our Falcon to the government in case they would replace current aircraft or they would buy more maritime patrol aircraft. We promote and we see what happens.”

Looking at the broader Australian market, Raynard described local conditions as “slow” due to the weakening Australian dollar over the past two years, with most activity still on pre-owned aircraft.

One highlight is the impending arrival of a Falcon 50 in a medevac configuration for Sydney-based operator Falcon Air.

On a more positive note, he was more upbeat about New Zealand, where Dassault Falcon could deliver “at least two Falcon” aircraft in 2017, which “would be a good year for us”.

“We have very good prospects,” Raynard said of New Zealand. “It is a small market but it is a very interesting market for us.

“You’ve got a lot of airports that are challenging, short runways. You’ve got a lot of rain so these runways become wet of course and you need very good performances.”

“That’s the beauty of the Falcon, you can have big cabin, comfortable, can fly eight hours with the 2000 and still have access to short runways.” Jacob, meanwhile, said the company continued to invest in customer support across Asia, which had been much appreciated by customers.

Australia is home to a Dassault Falcon authorised service centre, operated by Hawker Pacific at Sydney’s Bankstown Airport, while Sydneyheadquartered Hawker Pacific also operates authorised service centres for Dassault in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Shanghai.

“We are seeing already that most of our current customers claim that we probably have the best service in terms of reactivity, availability of parts, availability of people,” Jacob said. “We are doing good in other words.” Jacob described Dassault Falcon’s link with Hawker Pacific, both in Australia and Asia, was “excellent”.

“They are major service centres which are of the utmost importance for us because it covers very important areas of development,” says Jacob, who notes that “sales begins with support”. The man tasked with overseeing Dassault Falcon’s support organisations and arrangements, Geoff Chick, not surprisingly agrees.

“The philosophy for customer service is very simple. It is part of selling airplanes, if you sell an airplane and you don’t have service, people won’t be happy for very long and they won’t buy another one,” says Chick, senior vice president of customer service.

“But we have a much bigger philosophy than that, we take care of the Falcons basically from cradle to grave. Our oldest Falcon 20s were delivered in 1965, these aeroplanes are 52 years old and we support them exactly the same as we would a brand new delivered 8X. We have parts, we have technical expertise, we have engineering.”

Indeed for the 2,500 Falcon Jets delivered since 1965, over 2,110 are in service with 1,266 operators in 89 different countries, with just over half of the 515 Falcon 20s flying still earning their keep. In all, Falcon aircraft have accumulated over 18.5 million flights hours.

Those in-service aircraft are supported by six Dassault-owned Falcon service centres (three in the US, two in Europe and one in Brazil), nine Dassault-owned line maintenance facilities, 10 authorised heavy service centres, six authorised major service centres (including Hawker Pacific in Singapore) and 20 authorised line service centres (including Hawker Pacific in Sydney, KL and Shanghai). They are supported by 105 Dassault technical reps worldwide and three command centres (two in the US, one in France) manned 24/7 to respond to operators’ technical questions and issues.

“Because the Falcon is a worldwide aeroplane, especially the 7X and 8X, we have to look at not just where they are being based,” Chick notes. “They fly all over the world so we have to have a service centre network that takes care of that. Wherever you are likely to land we have some kind of presence not too far away.”

It is for that reason, despite the relatively small locally-based fleet, that not only with Hawker Pacific is there an authorised service centre in Australia, but Dassault holds a significant spare parts inventory in country to help support not just the local fleet but visiting Falcon aircraft to Australia and the region.

“We are trying to save minutes and hours when a machine breaks. All machines break, there’s no question about that, the question is how quickly can you respond.”

Chick says Dassault holds US$850 million in spare parts globally, US$31.3 million of which is held across Asia and US$3.3 million in Sydney.

“Australia is an interesting dynamic for us, because they have a few older airplanes down there, including a couple of Falcon 20s. They don’t have many airplanes overall, but because of where it is, if something breaks, we’re looking at a day as a minimum to get spare parts there, which is not good enough, so we are growing that [spares] inventory there, we’re up to $3 million already.”

And like Jacob, Chick characterises Dassault’s relationship with Hawker Pacific as “excellent. “They’ve been a long time partner, especially in Sydney and Singapore,” he said. “They’re very, very good to work with.”

If service is a less obvious discriminator for a corporate jet purchase, aircraft performance and technology are more obvious ones. It is here that Dassault has long emphasised its military aviation heritage and the linkages between its fighter jet and corporate jet lines – in its 100-year history, apart from the 2,500 Falcons almost all the balance of 8,000 aircraft Dassault has built have been military fighters (including over 1,400 Mirage IIIs and its variants), bombers and trainers.

Certainly all Falcon Jets have taken advantage of Dassault’s military aircraft design and manufacturing experience – by the time of the Mystere/Falcon 20’s first flight in May 1963 Dassault had already built hundreds of straight-wing Mystere and swept-wing Super Mystere jet fighters, while first deliveries of the first deltawing Mirage III fighters to the French air force had occurred almost two years earlier in July 1961.

Today that crossover continues, the Falcon 7X for example introduced flyby- wire flight controls using Dassault’s experience with the technology on the Rafale and Mirage 2000 fighters. Other areas of technological crossover include composite materials, man-machine interface design, head-up displays, and perhaps most importantly, 3D design technologies, using CATIA software developed by sister company Dassault Systemes.

“In terms of aerodynamics, avionics and flight controls we have [taken advantage of] all the military heritage of the company,” said Emmanuel Duluard, a Dassault sales engineer.

“We started to develop digital flight controls for military aircraft more than 40 years ago, we’ve evolved this concept of digital flight control systems know-how to optimise the aerodynamics of an aircraft. This heritage results in … very compact aircraft. Because when you design a military aircraft there is no wasted space. And if you do the same thing when you design a civilian aircraft you have the same reduction of size that you can observe between a Falcon and a competitor.

“With this very powerful [software] we have been able to develop for our military aircraft and using it to design our Falcon we have been able to design aircraft 25-30 per cent smaller in terms of size and weight,” Duluard said.

But while Dassault Aviation has a rich military aviation heritage, and continues to build the Rafale for the French military and export, the Falcon family today accounts for over twothirds of the company’s revenues. In 2016, for example, Dassault earned €2.34 billion in revenues from the wing designs.

Competitive advantages Dassault promotes for the Falcon family include shorter takeoff and landing distances – even the flagship Falcon 8X is certified to operate from London City Airport (with its short runway length and required steep approaches and departures) – and small differences between maximum takeoff and landing weights. This means the aircraft can take off at maximum takeoff weight, fly a short hop, pick up additional passengers and then depart for a longer‑range flight.

Another Falcon Jet characteristic is the trijet design first seen on the Falcon 50 and today in production with the Falcon 900LX, Falcon 7X and Falcon 8X. That configuration stems from a time when aircraft engines were less reliable than they are today, and so engine-out performance on a trijet is much improved compared to a twin-jet. But even today, with far more reliable engines, there are operational advantages to the trijet configuration. “What is important is the power you need to deliver, and fuel consumption is directly related to the power you need to deliver.” Duluard said.

“As we have lighter aircraft two engines or three engines are not the defining factor for the cost of fuel … what is really the defining factor for the cost of fuel you need to do a mission is the total power you need to deliver, and that can be shared between two engines or three engines.”

Notably, though, Dassault’s latest design, the Falcon 5X, is a twin-jet design. This latest Falcon was launched at the 2013 National Business Aviation Association’s annual convention in Las Vegas. At the time, Dassault Falcon line, more than twice the €1.23 billion that came from military sales.

But regardless of where the technology was developed, there’s no doubt the Dassault Falcon line is at the forefront of business aviation technology, thanks to features such as the EASy II advanced flightdeck, the FalconEye combined vision system, area-ruled rear fuselages and advanced in 2015 and certification by 2016. However, while the aircraft’s rollout ceremony took place on June 2 2015 at Bordeaux-Mérignac, engine issues have delayed the program.

Instead first flight took place on July 5 using a preliminary version of the all-new Safran Silvercrest engines, ahead of the full flight test campaign that is slated to get underway in 2018. The two-hour first flight took place at Dassault’s Bordeaux-Mérignac facility with test pilots Philippe Deleume and Philippe Rebourg in the flightdeck of the Falcon 5X development aircraft F-WFVX. Dassault said “advanced flight tests” would be conducted with the interim standard engines to “collect a certain amount of airframe and systems data that could not be generated during a ground test campaign undertaken earlier this spring”.

“We’re committed to limiting the consequences of the four-year engine development delay as much as possible and the short preliminary flight test campaign is part of this effort,” Dassault Aviation chief executive Eric Trappier said in a statement.

“We will closely monitor the validation tests on the modified Silvercrest, which are scheduled by Safran in the few coming months, as their results will be critical for meeting the 5X entry into service in 2020.” The “full fledged flight test campaign” is scheduled to begin in 2018.

Powered by two 11,450lb Silvercrest engines, the 5X is designed to fly 5,200nm with a cabin able to seat eight passengers alongside three crew. From Sydney, that puts cities in all of Japan, as well as parts of China and India, within nonstop reach. “Our customers are anxious to fly our new widebody Falcon,” Trappier said.

“Combined with the 5X’s new generation digital flight controls, the new ultra efficient wing will make it possible to blend the spaciousness and comfort of large cabin jets with the manoeuvrability, efficiency and airport capability of much smaller aircraft, establishing a new benchmark for the long range business jet market,” he promised.

The Falcon 5X will have the largest cabin of any Falcon Jet yet with an allnew fuselage cross-section, pipping the Gulfstream 650’s for both width and height. Dimensionally the Falcon 5X is marginally longer than the Falcon 8X but 1.8 tonnes lighter at max takeoff weight. And given Dassault’s history of stretching and adapting its business jet fuselage cross-sections for future designs, it seems likely that a larger, longer-ranging Falcon 5X (Falcon 9X perhaps?) is on the cards longer-term, an offering to take on the long-legged Gulfstream 650ER (7,500nm range) and forthcoming (but also delayed) Bombardier Global 8000 (promised range of 7,900nm).

Certainly, Australian Aviation contributor John Walton who attended the Falcon 5X rollout made the following observation at the time: “But the aircraft the 5X reminded me of most — and hear me out here — was the Airbus A380, and particularly the A380-800 version. The superjumbo was built with the expectation of a stretch, and its proportions are that little bit too wide and too short to be obviously the definitively designed version. So it is with the 5X: obviously, this is a more conventionally beautiful plane than the Airbus whalejet, but it’s just as obvious that a stretch is early on the cards.”

We’re committed to limiting the consequences of the fouryear engine development delay. ERIC TRAPPIER

In the meantime there is no question delays to the 5X have hurt Dassault financially, booking 12 cancellations for the 5X in 2016 alone. And that at a time of subdued conditions in the business aviation market.

Dassault delivered 45 Falcons in 2016 and plans to deliver a similar number in 2017. Those figures are about half the peak of 90 deliveries in 2009 and considerably fewer than the 70 aircraft a year Dassault’s factories are optimised for.

Production of the Falcon family is centred on Bordeaux in south-west France. Final assembly takes place in two separate assembly halls at Bordeaux-Mérignac airport (one for the Falcon 900 and 2000, one for the 7X and 8X – a separate assembly hall is home to Rafale fighter final assembly), while wing assembly takes place in a separate plant at Martignas, about 10 minutes drive to the west.

Final assembly at Mérignac takes about five months per aircraft. After two test flights all new Falcons then ferry to Little Rock, Arkansas where their interiors are installed and their exteriors painted, again another five month process.

Between its completion centre at Little Rock and its North American headquarters at Teterboro, New Jersey (just across the Hudson River from New York City), Dassault has a significant and long-standing presence in the US, not surprisingly given the US is by far Dassault’s largest market. That is a linkage that dates to the Falcon’s earliest days.In the early 1960s Pan American World Airways was looking to expand into the corporate jet market. After sending a delegation to France to evaluate the then Mystere 20 that included famed pilot Charles Lindbergh, Pan Am would order 40 aircraft which it named the Falcon Fan Jet for sale in the US. The first of those were delivered in mid-1965, and the Falcon Jet legend was born.

Additional reporting by Jordan Chong.