There is a family of French industrial objects one does not choose for its function alone: one subscribes to it as to an idea of precision. Watchmaking set out the principle, couture codified the gesture, architecture turned it into a morality of the line. Aviation carried that demand to a scale where accuracy becomes a condition of existence. On 4 May 1963, at the Mérignac aerodrome on the edge of Bordeaux, a white twinjet left the runway under the hands of René Bigand and installed that discipline in territory that was still new: business aviation. The Mystère 20 had flown. Sixty-three years later, the line it founded — the Falcon jets of Dassault Aviation — has passed 2,700 aircraft delivered, with more than 2,100 in service across over ninety countries.
The present gives that genealogy a particular resonance. On 19 June 2026, at 11.10 a.m., from runway 23 at Bordeaux-Mérignac — the same house, the same ground — the Falcon 10X prototype climbed away for a two-hour-thirty-minute maiden flight, flown by test pilot Sébastien Dupont de Dinechin with co-pilot Fabrice Dougnac. Sixty-three years separate the two take-offs; the continuity rests on a handful of principles the house has never needed to restate.
Founded in 1929 as Société des Avions Marcel Bloch and renamed Avions Marcel Dassault on 20 January 1947, when its founder adopted the Dassault name for good, the company has been chaired and led by Eric Trappier since January 2013. Its DNA lies in a rare porosity: the same design offices, the same Mérignac workshops and the same flight-control laws serve both the fighter and the business jet. From that circulation comes the Falcon signature — a wing worked like a piece of fine mechanics, aerodynamics inherited from the Mystère, the Mirage and the Rafale, and a purity of line recognisable in the air as on the ramp. Eric Trappier states the constant plainly: the formula has not changed, and every Dassault aircraft must have superb handling, beautiful lines and rugged construction.
What follows is not a catalogue. It keeps eight Falcons that each, in turn, moved the definition of the business jet — through a world first, an unprecedented architecture, or an instinct about comfort that became a standard. Chronological order, as befits a family history.
Falcon 20, The Founder
That first flight on 4 May 1963 took place in the afternoon, for a reason that now belongs to the heritage of the house: Charles Lindbergh had come that morning to inspect the prototype on behalf of Pan American World Airways, and the test team waited until he had left Mérignac before readying the aircraft. Lindbergh went away convinced; Juan Trippe followed his judgement. On 2 August 1963 Pan Am placed a firm order for forty aircraft, with an option on a further one hundred and twenty, powered by General Electric CF 700 turbofans. It was the American carrier that supplied the commercial name under which the jet would cross the Atlantic: Fan Jet Falcon. An entire dynasty had just been christened.
Ten passengers, Mach 0.8, three-axis servo controls and conical wing cambers designed with ONERA, cousins of those used on the Mirage and Concorde: the Mystère 20 carried military know-how straight into the civil cabin. Deliveries began in the summer of 1965; four hundred and seventy-seven Falcon 20s and thirty-eight Falcon 200s came off the line. In 1973 a young express freight company called Federal Express launched its network with thirty-three modified Falcon 20s, and the French business jet became the founding tool of worldwide express delivery.
Explore the Falcon fleet on the official site
Falcon 50, The Transatlantic
On 7 November 1976, Hervé Leprince-Ringuet and Gérard Joyeuse took aloft at Mérignac the first business trijet conceived as such, recognisable by the S-duct feeding its centre engine. Three Garrett TFE 731-3 engines of 1,680 kg thrust each, and a clear brief: 3,400 nautical miles, or 6,300 km, on regulatory reserves. The aircraft flew again on 6 May 1977 with an entirely redrawn wing that made it the world’s first civil aircraft with a supercritical wing — an advance the house would carry over to the Falcon 900 and then the Falcon 2000. Certified on 27 February 1979, the Falcon 50 offered 5,830 km of range and opened the Atlantic to its passengers without a stop.
Falcon 900, The Intercontinental
On 21 September 1984, Hervé Leprince-Ringuet, this time with Jérôme Résal, lifted off in a twelve-to-fourteen-seat trijet designed on CATIA — the design software born inside the house — and built with composites wherever weight saving justified them. Roughly 65 % of the aircraft, fuselage and wings included, was produced at Mérignac, where final assembly also took place. The Falcon 900 established Dassault Aviation lastingly in the intercontinental segment; the 900EX entered service in 1996 and the family would pass 550 aircraft delivered. The Falcon 900LX still stands in the official range today.
Falcon 2000, The Bestseller
A twinjet derived from the 900 airframe, the Falcon 2000 became the most widely delivered of the line, with close to seven hundred aircraft handed over. Its success says something about the method of the house: a proven architecture refined generation after generation rather than replaced, right through to the 2000LXS still on offer. This is classicism in the noble sense — the right form, held for a long time.
Falcon 7X, The Pioneer
On 5 May 2005 the Falcon 7X carried into the Mérignac sky a digital flight control system adapted from the Rafale, making it the world’s first fly-by-wire business jet. Mechanical linkages gave way to computers that read the pilot’s sidestick, work out the best combination of control surface inputs and protect the flight envelope. Certified by the FAA and EASA in April 2007 and in service that June, it opened, with the 8X, a line approaching four hundred aircraft delivered.
Falcon 8X, The Sovereign
Three Pratt & Whitney Canada PW307D engines of 6,722 lb thrust, 6,450 nautical miles — 11,945 km — nonstop, a thirteen-metre cabin for twelve to sixteen passengers, a certified ceiling of 51,000 ft and a quoted 49 EPNdB cabin sound level: the Falcon 8X takes the trijet formula to its point of balance. It carries the FalconEye Combined Vision System, which layers infrared imagery over synthetic terrain, and claims up to 15 % better fuel efficiency than competing ultra-long-range aircraft.
Falcon 6X, The Extra Widebody
Certified by EASA and the FAA on 22 August 2023 and in service from 30 November that year, the Falcon 6X introduced the extra widebody idea to business aviation: a cabin 2.58 m wide, 1.98 m high and 12.30 m long, for 52.20 m3 of living volume. Two Pratt & Whitney Canada PW812D engines of 13,500 lb, 5,500 nautical miles or 10,186 km of range, a maximum speed of Mach 0.90 and a 1,560 m take-off distance: here the house shows that drawing-room volume can live alongside performance inherited from the fighter.
Falcon 10X, The Horizon
On 19 June 2026 the 10X took its turn in the air. Its two Rolls-Royce Pearl 10X engines deliver more than 18,000 lb of thrust each; its cabin — 2.77 m wide, 2.03 m high, 16.40 m long — is presented by the house as the largest ever drawn for a purpose-built business jet; and its announced range reaches 7,500 nautical miles, or 13,890 km, with eight passengers aboard. On that maiden sortie the crew assessed handling and systems at 15,000 ft before climbing to 40,000 ft and accelerating to Mach 0.82. Eric Trappier saluted the dedication and skill of the engineering, production and flight-test teams and the quality of the global partner network.
Sixty-three years after René Bigand, the same runway, the same gesture: lifting off an object whose beauty is never separable from its aerodynamic rightness. That thread, more than any specification sheet, is what makes the Falcon a living part of the French art de vivre.
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