Three months of flight testing are proving the promise of the EASy cockpit to make it simpler and safer to fly, says Dassault Falcon.

"The proof of concept is now validated," Dassault vice-chairman Bruno Revellin-Falcoz said here Monday.

The new cockpit, which is based on the Honeywell Primus Epic system, is expected to be JAA- and FAA-certified on the Falcon 900EX in the first quarter of 2003, with deliveries to begin in the fourth quarter of 2004. Certification and deployment in the 2000EX is to follow a year later.

"The EASy flight deck is a highly intuitive system," Dassault says, "geared towards streamlining and simplifying the man-machine interface in the cockpit. "The program is going to create a major breakthrough in the attitude and behavior of crew and cockpit," said Revellin-Falcoz.

"All those who have already had the chance to fly the Falcon 900EX EASy s/n 97 since its maiden flight," the company asserts this week, "have declared it to be precisely the 'major step forward' Dassault announced at the 2000 NBAA convention."

EASy is described as "a cleverly integrated, feature-packed avionics system," and beyond that as a "much more fundamental type of progress toward the new, virtually paperless cockpit."

Making the true paperless cockpit a reality will depend on convincing airworthiness authorities of the merits of the idea, Revellin-Falcoz observed here.

Fewer controls, among them a new cursor control device, serve to reduce pilot workload, and pilots always have the option of switching to a conventional keyboard for data input.

What's not been easy is to improve safety from today's high, but not quite perfect, levels. "Manufacturers have a responsibility to improve safety," Dassault senior vp for civil aircraft Jean-François Georges said this week. "One of our industry's problems is that we have all been making essentially very safe aircraft for a very long time.

"Now the safety curve is leveling off, so what can we do about it? Human-factors problems underlie two thirds of all accidents," Georges says, with so-called "misunderstandings" between pilots and avionics at the root of many. "The only solution is to improve situational awareness," he says.

 

Now About that Supersonic Business Jet A question about the supersonic business jet that's been studied by Dassault Falcon met with chuckles at the Dassault Falcon briefing here Monday. "We maintain a little team," answered company chairman Charles Edelstenne. He repeated the company's position that there are no commercially available engines that can handle sustained supersonic flight. Once viable engines are in hand, Edelstenne predicted, it will take just a relatively brief time to solve the problem of "supersonic bang."