Dassault working round the clock to get 7X flying again

The company is hoping it will receive approval by the weekend, ahead of the Paris Airshow where the aircraft will be leading the civil display by the company.

The Falcon 7X was grounded because of a stabiliser trim fault, that occurred on 25th May when the crew experienced a pitch trim event during descent. The crew successfully recovered the aircraft to a stable flight profile and performed an uneventful landing.   Dassault requested the global grounding of the type. One leading operator in the MENA region is Saudi Private Aviation which operates the 7X for its long haul flights.

Dassauly said it had developed and validated a modification, which it said will feature additional automated protection beyond that already designed into the horizontal stabiliser trim circuitry. This involves both software and hardware alterations, which have already been tested and validated on a test bench.

In an interview with Flightglobal, Dassault said it is "co-ordinating an unprecedented logistic effort" to manage the modifications within its own service centres and its Falcon authorised service network, adding that "additional dedicated retrofit lines have been set up in France, at Bordeaux-Mérignac and Istres, and also in Little Rock, Arkansas".

The manufacturer says its investigation "has confirmed that the Falcon 7X control laws operated normally, which allowed development of a safe ferry procedure using the digital flight control system in normal mode".

The 7X entered service in 2007, 112 aircraft have been delivered, and until this event they had accumulated over 75,000 fault-free flight hours, said the company.