Pratt & Whitney Canada (P&WC) confirmed in early December that its new PW812D turbofan engine , designed to power the Dassault Falcon 6X business jet , has received certification from the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
This follows certifications obtained in December 2021 from Transport Canada and, in August 2022, from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency. This is one more step towards the entry into service of the Falcon 6X scheduled for mid-2023. To date, the PW812D has undergone over 6,100 hours of testing, including over 1,150 hours in flight.
Manufactured in Quebec, the family of PW800 engines developed since the early 2000s is constantly evolving. The latest addition to the family, the PW812D offers significant improvements in fuel consumption, emissions and noise over other comparable current generation engines. Also, the PW812D requires 40% less scheduled maintenance and 20% fewer inspections than other engines in its class.
The PW812D engine and the Falcon 6X aircraft therefore seem on the right track to form a winning combination likely to make people forget the Falcon 5X fiasco . Since the first flight of the Falcon 6X in March 2021, the test program has been going well. The Falcon 6X flight test fleet includes three aircraft that have successfully completed extreme cold weather, hot weather and high altitude testing. Last July a fourth Falcon 6X undertook a month-long worldwide demonstration tour which included fifty flights over five continents for a cumulative distance of 92,600 kilometres.
To date, Dassault has assembled around twenty Falcon 6Xs, some of which are at the interior finishing stage to meet the needs expressed by the first customers. Targeting the entry-level segment of large-cabin, ultra-long-range business jets, it remains to be seen whether the Falcon 6X will be a commercial success. We can already predict that the Falcon 6X will be, at the very least, a technological success and the fruit of a great Franco-Quebec cooperation.
