Dassault Aviation’s Falcon 8X continues demonstrating its flexibility as a business jet as well as special-mission platform, with the recent award by France of a contract to Dassault Aviation and Thales to equip two 8X business jets with the Thales Capacité Universelle de Guerre Electronique (CUGE, universal electronic warfare capability) signals intelligence suite.

Thales has developed a new generation of signals intelligence technologies to enhance strategic intelligence capabilities. The emphasis lies in managing increasingly complex situations in real-time to speed the decision-making process for commanders. The CUGE system can detect both radios and radars, and analyze their signals, simultaneously for the first time. It employs multi-polarization antennas and artificial intelligence in its automated data processing.

Thales (Chalet F23) produces all of the CUGE equipment and is responsible for integrating the system into the Falcon 8X platform. It is also providing a ground-based training system for the monitoring and intelligence specialists who will feed data into armed forces databases to provide a better understanding of the strategic environment.

Falcon 6X Progress

The Falcon 8X, which is on static display outside the Dassault chalet (CD43-45), has made strong inroads in the business aviation market, but now the company is focusing on its next Falcon model, the large-cabin 6X. According to Dassault, the design is frozen, critical subassemblies already are being completed and engine testing is on track. The 6X fuselage mockup is also on display, along with a Falcon 2000LXS.

The first completed 6X wing subassembly is expected to be shipped by April to Dassault’s Bordeaux-Merignac plant, where it will be mated to the first fuselage section. Final assembly of the first 6X is set for early this year, with first flight expected next year and planned entry into service in 2022.

The 6X’s cabin is unique, in that it has the largest cross-section of a purpose-built business jet, at 8 foot 6 inches wide and 6 foot 6 inches high.

Engineers working in a special noise laboratory at Dassault’s St. Cloud, France headquarters analyze and mitigate sources of noise in new Falcon designs. This effort ramped up when the Falcon 7X was in development and more recently with the 8X and upcoming 6X.

The need for significant noise reduction in business jet cabins is especially critical for ultra-long-range jets like the 6X, and what the engineers produce in the lab is a more accurate evaluation of the perceived noise inside an aircraft cabin, which Dassault terms “comfort note.” The higher the comfort note number, the better the noise level (perceived comfort) inside the aircraft. The 8X’s comfort note is relatively high, at 10, and the 6X’s will likely be even better.

The 6X flight deck will feature a third-generation Honeywell Epic-based EASy III avionics suite with Dassault’s FalconEye Combined Vision System—the first head-up display to combine enhanced and synthetic vision capabilities, according to Dassault—already certified to 100-foot reduced minima on the Falcon 8X, 900LX, and 2000 series. A FalconSphere II electronic flight bag is standard. 

With a maximum range of 5,500 nm (10,186 km), the 6X will be capable of flying directly from Los Angeles to London, São Paulo to Chicago, or Paris to Beijing at Mach 0.85. Its ultra-efficient wing minimizes the impact of turbulence and a next-generation digital flight control system controls all moving surfaces. They include flaperons, which considerably improves control during approach, especially on steep descents, Dassault said.

The wing, as on previous Falcon models, is optimized for both high- and low-speed performance; leading-edge slats and trailing-edge flaps yield low takeoff and approach speeds, which will permit the 6X, with partial fuel loads, to access airports with runways of less than 3,000 feet, as well as operate at airports requiring steep approaches such as London City and Lugano, Italy. 

The 13,000- to 14,000-pound-thrust Pratt & Whitney PurePower PW812D engines that will power the new Falcon have accumulated nearly 1,000 hours of runtime on the Pratt test bench in Montreal, Canada, using five development engines. Pratt & Whitney has accumulated more than 13,000 hours to date on the variant of the geared turbofan (GTF) core at the heart of the Dassault-specific PW812D. The GTF core is shared by 16 different engine applications that have amassed more than 585,000 flight hours in all.

"We expect the Asia-Pacific region to be a major driver for our ultra-widebody Falcon 6X," said Dassault Aviation chairman Eric Trappier, "as it is already proving to be for our Falcon 8X flagship. The region has always been a key market for Falcon aircraft, whose efficiency, cabin comfort, and safety level are important criteria for local operators." 

There are more than 100 Falcon jets flying in Asia-Pacific, and more than half of those are the fly-by-wire 7X and 8X models.