Dassault Aviation's second Falcon 10X has joined the flight-test campaign for the ultra-long-range business jet, giving the French manufacturer two aircraft to share certification work as it targets entry into service in 2029.
The aircraft, serial number 2 and registered F-WTEN, made its maiden flight from Bordeaux-MΓ©rignac on 24 September 2026, Aerobuzz and Air Data News reported. Test pilots Fabrice Dougnac and Antoine Doussaud were at the controls for the three-hour sortie. Like the first prototype, SN2 is powered by two Rolls-Royce Pearl 10X turbofans.
A quiet first flight
Unusually, Dassault did not issue a formal announcement for the first flight, FlightGlobal noted. The company disclosed it through its Falcon social media accounts, with photos of the airborne jet showing the F-WTEN registration. According to FlightGlobal, the second aircraft has already racked up three flights since that unheralded debut.
The first Falcon 10X flew on 19 June 2026, three months earlier. On that flight, test pilot SΓ©bastien Dupont de Dinechin and co-pilot Fabrice Dougnac took off from runway 23 at Bordeaux-MΓ©rignac at 11:10 for a flight of two and a half hours, evaluating handling qualities and systems at 15,000 feet before retracting the landing gear and climbing to 40,000 feet, where they accelerated to Mach 0.82, Dassault said at the time. The aircraft had been publicly rolled out at Bordeaux-MΓ©rignac on 10 March 2026.
Three aircraft for certification
SN2 was always part of the planned test fleet rather than an addition prompted by delays, Air Data News pointed out. Dassault will use three Falcon 10Xs for flight testing and certification. The third aircraft is being fitted with a fully equipped cabin and will be used mainly for systems, cabin functional and reliability testing under conditions close to those customers will experience. With two aircraft now flying, Dassault can split certification tasks and gather flight-test data faster than it could with one jet.
Four years behind the original plan
The schedule has moved a long way since Dassault unveiled the Falcon 10X in May 2021 with a 2025 service-entry target. Supply-chain difficulties later pushed that to 2027, and the company now expects certification and entry into service in 2029. Chief executive Γric Trappier has said certification should take about two and a half years from the start of flight testing, and has pointed to increasingly demanding certification requirements after the Boeing 737 MAX accidents, noting that the 10X is an all-new aircraft that faces a different process from the Falcon 6X, according to Air Data News.
Dassault spent about five years on ground testing before the 10X flew. The programme combines a new large-diameter fuselage, a composite wing developed specifically for the aircraft, the Pearl 10X engines and a new generation of Dassault's digital flight-control system.
Aiming at the top of the market
The Falcon 10X is designed to compete at the top of the business jet market with the Gulfstream G700 and Bombardier Global 7500. The aircraft will have a range of 7,500 nautical miles (13,890 km) and will have the largest cabin cross-section of any purpose-built business jet currently in development, Air Data News reported.
For buyers, the key question is whether the 2029 date now holds. The pace at which SN2 and the cabin-equipped third aircraft build hours over the coming months will be the clearest signal, and Aviation Shop News will follow the campaign as Dassault publishes milestones.
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