A PANDA for Falcon Pilots

"Don't fly without your PANDA" may be good advice for Falcon pilots. This is not to recommend the presence of a portly, furry, slouching, bamboo-shoot-munching animal of Asian descent in the right seat, but to point up the advantages of a Dassault-developed program that takes some of the estimation out of flight planning.

PANDA is short for Performance ANalysis Dassault Aviation. Dassault sales engineers have used PANDA for some time to calculate the performance of Falcon jets in real-world missions from a prospective customer's home base. A more sophisticated version is now being offered to Falcon operators.

PANDA uses performance tables and the Boeing wind database to calculate range, fuel consumption, runway requirements and other factors for specific city pairs. With a FlightStar option, it provides real-world routing distances rather than simple great-circle distances, and it can compute the equal time point, or ETP, so that pilots can determine whether to press on, turn back or find an emergency landing location if one engine fails.

Dassault is demonstrating PANDA at NBAA (Booth 7943). The company has also brought back its Falcon 2000 Reality Center, a virtual mock-up that allows visitors to "fly" through a Falcon 2000. This demonstration showcases Dassault Systemes' CATIA 3D computer-aided design and manufacturing system, the most widely used system of its type. (U.S. users include the Boeing Commercial Airplane Group and Lockheed Martin for the Joint Strike Fighter.)

Dassault stresses that what visitors see is not a movie, but a real-time tour of the Falcon 2000 database, hosted in Silicon Graphics ONYX2 supercomputers.

Three Falcon company demonstrators are on static display here: a Falcon 50EX, a Falcon 2000 and a Falcon 900EX. Absent from the company fleet, for the first time in many years, is the 900B, which is being replaced by the new 900C. Dassault reports that 1,269 Falcons have been delivered to 70 countries, and that they have logged more than 7 million flight hours since the first Falcon 20 flew in 1963.

By Bill Sweetman