The 900LX’s cabin has standard configurations for between 12 and 19 passengers with three distinct seating areas. The cabin offers great light and all the latest cabin technology, including high-speed Internet and telephone, substantial work areas, convenient and capacious baggage compartments, a first-rate galley and a substantial lavatory. As you might expect, 900LX passengers get a five-star experience.
Falcon in Flight
It was a beautiful if chilly winter day at Dassault Falcon Jet’s Teterboro headquarters on the day of my flight in the 900LX. The plan called for a long round-robin flight up through the Hudson Valley and west toward Syracuse and then a stop at Stewart, New York, for some pattern work before heading back home again. The out-and-back trip would take around an hour and a half and would give me the opportunity to see the 900LX’s performance in a number of interesting flight regimes. Falcon Jet Capt. Paul Hansen was in the right seat and Dassault avionics expert and pilot training director Woody Saland was in back.
The 900LX is a tiller airplane, and it handles responsively and predictably on the ground, though it does take a bit to get used to how carefully you need to manipulate the control when taxiing. A little tiller goes a long way.
On takeoff I stood the power levers up (being sure to grab a handful of levers) and waited two beats for the beast to come alive. The 900LX requires tiller until 80 knots, which happens in a hurry with 15,000 pounds of total thrust on a sub-50,000-pound airplane. V1 and rotation speed come fast. The 900LX needs just 5,101 feet for a sea level max-weight takeoff, this for an airplane that, if we’d carried full fuel, could have proceeded to fly nonstop to Paris from there.
We, however, were light for a short flight and were, consequently, off the ground in a hurry and climbing fast. I had to come back on the power just moments after commanding “flaps up” in order to keep the speed down for our level-off at 2,000 feet. Learning to effectively use the trim, which runs in a leisurely fashion, requires some practice and some foresight. The autothrottles too come in very handy, because they remember (if you forget) to pull the power back, saving the pilot a possible bust for an airspeed and/or altitude deviation.
