New PW308 for Falcon 2000

Pratt & Whitney Canada continues to find new applications for its PW300-series turbofan. The latest is for a new variant of the PW308 selected by Dassault Aviation to power a derivative of its Falcon 2000 widebody twin business jet.

The new Falcon program was announced here yesterday in respective news conferences by Dassault and P&WC. Additionally, P&WC will flesh out details on the new engine, the PW308C, at a follow-on press conference at 2:00 p.m. today in the Convention Center.

The PW308C is described as "an 8,000 pounds thrust-class engine." It is built on the frame of P&WC's scaled-up PW308 series, originally developed to power the IAI Galaxy super midsize business jet. Another version of the engine powers Fairchild Aerospace's 30-passenger 328JET regional airliner.

P&WC has delivered more than 500 PW300-series turbofans since production began in the early 1990s, and the collective fleet has logged more than a million hours. The initial program was announced at the 1986 Farnborough Air Show as a new-technology demonstration initiative for high-bypass, fuel-efficient turbofans sized between 5,000 and 6,000 pounds thrust. First applications were for the 5,000 pounds thrust PW305 variant aboard the Raytheon Hawker 1000 and Bombardier Learjet 60 midsize business jets.

The PW308 series, launched on the Galaxy and selected for the gestating Hawker Horizon and Cessna Sovereign super midsize business jets, features a larger fan and compressor module. The bigger blower produces a 30% increase in mass flow through the engine core and is largely responsible for hiking the powerplant's maximum thrust into the 8,000 pounds class.

The PW308C placement on the Falcon 2000 derivative highlights a year in which Pratt Canada will deliver its 50,000th turbine engine since the Pratt & Whitney/United Technologies subsidiary launched the PT6A program in 1963. Since then, total fleet use of all P&WC-built turboshafts, turboprops and turbofans has amounted to more than 325 million hours.

By David Esler