Winging It

There’s no apparent let-up in sight for the companies adding winglets to the aircraft, whose “cool factor” may have as much to do with driving upgrades as performance.

Dassault, having embraced them for the Falcon 7X, now also using them on the Falcon 2000 twin-jet. The company has just launched the Falcon 2000LX, an upgrade to the EX model, that adds 200 naut. mi. to range and boosts it to 4,000 naut. mi., says Charles Edelstenne, CEO of Dassault Aviation. The upgrade will be available starting next year, and can also be retrofitted.

Aviation Partners worked with Dassault on the new winglets, which are 66-inches high and add 6 ft. 9 inches toe the wingspan. The cost for the retrofit, or to modify in-production 2000EXs is $550,000 – the cost when factored into the list price of the Falcon 2000LX, when the winglets are installed from the get-go, will be somewhat less.

Dassault also is investigating whether the upgrade would make sense for the Falcon 900. It isn’t ready to commit for several months, so stay tuned for some further winglet words out of Dassault at NBAA, Similarly, Cessna plans to flight test winglets on its Citation X soon. The company will not say what performance improvement it expects, but Roger Whyte, Cessna’s senior vice president for sales and marketing promises to have numbers and a price tag at the ready at NBAA.

--Robert Wall, at EBACE 2007, Geneva