no, the passenger cabins are pretty much identical on the 20/200 and the 50..in fact down to the last inch..same length..I hope I am right…but, yes pretty sure, except I think cabin interior height is a bit more on the 50s than on the 20s, but only from a certain serial number on..they had rearranged some floor board configurations for that

the 50 naturally has that big advantage ( among others) of having a huge additional pressurized baggage compartment in the rear..

a bit of lack of baggage space always had been a bit of a shortcoming on the 20/200..a bit like the 700/800 Hawkers…same situation..

I recall attending a Falcon 20 M&O Conference at NBAA back when the 731 program pretty much in full swing. One of the attendees addressed the speaker from FJC about the status of the P&W 305 conversion that was then in development. The FJC guy quickly cut him off 3 times assuring him, and everyone else in the room, that there would be NO conversion other than the Garrett 731 for the F20. And, of course, he was correct. I have always thought that the marriage of the 305, with its additional thrust, to the 20 airframe might have been a good one as it would have more completely utilized the 20's potential as would be the case with the -60. However, it would have been only a pipe dream to think that this would happen as long as Falcon Jet and Garrett were in bed together on the 10, 200, and 50.

The 305 conversion was in full development and had its first flight in Feb of 1991. From what i have heard through the grapevine, the tooling was destroyed in the Sierra Madre earthquake in June of the same year. At that point they decided to abandon the project.

YES

Michael and Shawn,

I do remember, that was what happened.

At that time the company I was with, we had a cream puff 20E, S/N 323, and both the Allied Signal (731) folks AND the Volpar (PW305) folks bombarded us with their literature, because there was some thought within the company to retrofit that nice bird then..

My take on it would be the following..( naturally only with all that hindsight, that is easy, decades after the facts…)

That Falcon 20 was and is the "family jewell" of Dassault in regards to the Falcon line..

And in a way I understood, that they wanted to embark on a relatively low-risk conversion..Dassault was in a bind, after that last F20, or was it a F200 had been produced in 1991, and Dassault had no follow up model, but all those Falcon 20 customers demanded one ( and yes, the Hawker 800/1000 , at least cabin-wise were the only competitors for the F20 back then)..and Dassault wanted to keep engineering control over it..

sure the rest of the ( in production) line up, at that time only the 50 and the 900, already were 731 powered..

So on the one hand Dassault had decided, that they would fully underwrite a retrofit program, and in fact they did, the F20 731 conversion actually was engineered and tested by Dassault, and for Dassault in regards to engineering it was nearly a non-event, guess 85%, or even 90% of the airframe related parts for the conversion came right off the F900 production line..and certification-wise they decided a very elegant solution, they made it a Service Bulletin..

But Dassault, for obvious reasons did not want to underwrite two different programs..that probably would have been against the company principle..

On the other hand the Falcon 200 had proven that a mere 500lbs take-off thrust per side more would do wonders for some performance parameters..

would that Volpar (PWC 305) conversion also have become sucessful, if finished?….quite probably, yes..

That Hawker 1000 sure was a fine airplane…


and if one considers how many Hawkers (800XP, 850 and 900) had been sold since Raytheon had taken over the Hawker program from BAE…? In fact, quite possible, that that fact alone, that the F20 was out of production, may have been the main driver for Raytheon back then to take over and invest into the Hawker line..

I am pretty sure that there was some serious soul-searching going on at Dassault later…


with not having a real follow-on model for the F20…Dassault had given away hundreds of sales to Raytheon in the 90's and 2000 years… in my humble opinion…

P.S.: but then again…..? what had happened with Raytheons plans with Beechcraft, what had happened afterwards?

Dassault still is Dassault, highly profitable, and here to stay...…

and of the Falcon 2000 line, what many within Dassault still regard as the REAL Falcon 20 follow-up ( in the name of Marcel Dassault's main principle, to always advance…), well at last count, of all the versions…more than 560 have been delivered to happy customers so far, and still counting...

Shawn, Volpar did, indeed, have a successful start up with the 305. I don't remember exactly when the M&O Seminar took place, whether before or after Volpar's flight testing began. I think what the FJC representative was saying was that there would be no support (engineering or otherwise) for any conversion save for Garrett's from Dassault. Circumstances, whether coincidental or not, seemed to bear him out. I do recall some very audible sighs of disappointment in the room when the statement was made. And as Gerd says, undoubtably, Dassault got caught with their pants down to the cost of a lot sales by not having something in the wings to fill in for the by then out of production F20. Even so, they have survived and are thriving. And I still believe that the 305 would have made at least as good, if not better, performer out of an already stellar airframe than did the 731. Jus' sayin'.

Gerd, or Shawn, do you recall around the same time period someone (Volpar?) working on twin engine conversion (305?) for L-1329 JetStar?

Michael, yes, I think though, that was the GE CF-34, of Challenger 601 and all subsequent model's fame, great engine by the way, that the folks in California wanted to modify the good old "lead sled" with, and make a twin out of a quad..not sure whether it was Volpar though…I think it flew though, as a prototype..

I think there was a 731 program for the JetStar as well.

Oh yes, you could bolt them on an old Jetstar by STC, and the Jetstar II came standard with 731s anyway..

well, that was an interesting time…Dassault in the beginning of the 90's already was developing the excellent 50EX, as very much improved and in the market well-accepted 50 version, the 900EX, beautiful evolution of the F900 line, and last but not least concentrated heavily on the F2000 development, a signature product, an airplane customers had waited for, and it has become a phenomenal success for Dassault, I think rightly so..

After the F2000 started to deliver in full swing, in the second half of the 90s, Dassault I think thought very hard about a new model in the F20 size, asked customers, what kind of technology and performance they would like…etc

but then decided against it..they had their hands full to deliver all those 50EXs, F900EXs, 2000s and already at that time, started the EASy cockpit developments and probably started in earnest on the development of the 7X..and in a way, the new F20 customers from the past had become new F2000 customers for the future..bigger cabins were what that market had demanded..

In the US with Raytheon and Cessna and others, the fractional orders started coming in big time…but I am not sure whether those huge fractional orders, numbers until then unheard of in the bizav industry, really were such a blessing, in the short and medium term..for the manufacturers I mean..I think some of the OEMs started to become seriously overloaded..they sometimes suddenly had to triple output, suppliers were sold out for years,..and the OEMs quite naturally could not "reinvent" their factories as fast as those huge orders would have dictated…if you take into account the substantial discounts some OEMs had to grant to the fractionals, but at the same time the OEMs production costs skyrocketed…well, guess there must have been a reason why Raytheon wanted to get out….

So in hindsight I guess, Dassault was not too unhappy not to have played that game to the hilt like some others, in fact they did not play that numbers game at all..OK they also very successfully delivered to some fractionals,,,but in (for Dassault ) quite manageable numbers…
Dassault is pretty conservative in regards to the growth rate they impose on their company..

Dassault used to like to rather arrogantly lecture the marketplace a wing that needed winglets was never designed right in the first place.

Then came the 7x and all of a sudden they stopped saying that.

oh yes...

you remember the old F50 commercials, in the 80s, where Dassault proudly stated, well our wings will always stay "clean"…we do not need that stuff…but then again, at that time that commercial was more geared to the fact that Falcons never needed Vortex generators and that kind of stuff, and that still is true...

well, I guess when Gulfstream and Bombardier put that 6000 NM sales & marketing sound barrier into the race ( G550 and Globals) Dassault "reconsidered" and with the winglets squeezed some additional 35- 40 minutes endurance at M 0.80 out of that 7X wing…

then the 2000LX and 900LX models followed…

they are gents though at Dassault, they quietly "gave in"….

rumor has it though, that good old Serge Dassault had to convince the purists at Dassault Engineering with some good vintage bottles of Chateau Dassault until they gave up resisting….

P.S.: The "future Falcon" gang though at Dassault still seems to be stubborn….

But once that model will come out, they probably will have some other secrets and magic in that wing…that whole wing will be a winglet…

http://www.dassaultfalcon.com/en/Technology/Innovation/Pages/Future%20Falcons.aspx

http://www.dassaultfalcon.com/en/Pages/Home.aspx

It's hard to resist when customers want to see winglets when they look out the window..

Biggest career mistake ?
When I was just a young lad flying Navajos and FedEx was flying Falcons I meet the Chief Pilot somewhere (where lost to the annals of time) and I asked about flying for FedEx. He said just to get my Falcon Type Rating and they'd hire me.
My response? "Nobody buys their own type rating"!