Every Falcon shares DNA with Dassault’s fighter jets.
Credit the diligence and perseverance of Andrew Ponzoni, Dassault Falcon Jet’s senior manager of communications, for making this possible. After Ponzoni called dozens of operators over several weeks, he finally got the OK from Chuck Kaady in Hillsboro, Oregon. Kaady’s aircraft is a 1980 Falcon 20-F5, serial number 408, that he’s owned since late 2015 when he upgraded from a Falcon 10. Kaady’s airplane is a plum example of a “restomod,” immaculately restored and highly modified to keep it young, despite its age of 43 years. It looks like it recently rolled off the Dassault assembly line in Bordeaux, con- temporarily dressed in bright white with black and gray accents. This plum would be a peach for our video. Falcon 20s also were the largest of the legacy midsize class twins, having 24-foot long, 700-cubic-foot inte- riors providing room for eight to nine passengers and a full-width, externally serviced lavatory in the aft cabin. Kaady’s airplane has a four-chair club section up front and a divan with two facing chairs on the opposite side in the rear. Acoustical insulation of the era is not on par with today’s super-quiet jets. Cabin sound levels in flight invite use of noise attenuating headsets. Passengers’ own tablet computers or smartphones provide inflight enter- tainment. In the mid-1960s, the Mystère-Falcon 20 was the fastest purpose-built aircraft in corporate aviation, able to cross the U.S. with one fuel stop quicker than most airplanes could fly nonstop coast to coast. Similar to the Méditer-
ranée, the Falcon 20’s transonic wings were adapted from Dassault’s Mystère IV fighter, as were its 3,000 psi hy- draulic system, dual redundant powered flight controls, trimmable horizontal stabilizer, and speed-proportion- ate artificial control feel system. These features enabled it to boast the highest redline speeds—370 kias V MO and 0.85 M MO —as well as endowing it with arguably the nicest feel in one’s fingertips of any civil jet aircraft of the era. Kaady’s jet was converted into a Falcon 20-F5, also called a 731 Falcon 20F, in the late 1990s by the incorpo- ration of Service Bulletin 735, a mod developed jointly by Dassault in France and Garrett AiResearch in Los Ange- les in the late 1980s. The SB mod replaces the original GE CF700 engines with Honeywell (formerly AlliedSignal and Garrett) TFE731-5BR geared turbofans, virtually the same 4,750-pound thrust engines and nacelles fitted to the Falcon 900B trijet. The considerably more fuel-effi- cient 731 powerplants increase range from 1,450 to 2,450 nm while meeting Stage III airport noise limits by wide margins and reducing maintenance cost. So the 20-F5 turns more two-leg trips into nonstop missions, especial- ly when flying west to east with tailwinds. The value proposition of the 731 Falcon 20 conversion was so compelling that more than one-third of the then active Mystère-Falcon 20 corporate fleet was converted in the 1990s, according to Don Sterling, former 1960s-era Pan Am BJD Western states sales lead and later head of Garrett AiResearch’s TFE731 mod program. This aircraft also was updated with Collins Pro Line
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