Bombardier: Global 7500 Has 30% Runway Landing Advantage

The Bombardier Global 7500, and its Model 8000 successor, can access 30% more airports in real-world conditions than its “closest competitor in speed and range,” Bombardier sales engineer Melissa Giannangelo told AIN, citing its internal data. However, she demurred on naming that competitor.

Typically, the company’s sales engineering team works one-on-one with customers—current and potential—to crunch the numbers to see if a specific Bombardier jet can operate at a certain airport. But the marketing team asked for a broader look at the Global 7500’s airport operating capability versus the closest competition.

The project started with an analysis of more than 13,000 airports worldwide. Then the sales engineering team further narrowed it down to airports with runways exceeding 3,500 feet and elevation up to 8,000 feet msl, resulting in 6,500 airports where the Global 7500 could land under typical wind conditions, dry runways, and stopping on 60% of available length (i.e., FAA Part 135 operating limitations). These include 2,500 airports in the U.S., 950 in Europe, 800 in Latin America, and 2,250 in the rest of the world.

Instead of calculating data airport-by-airport, the company wrote Python code to automatically plot the airports where the Global 7500 and the competing twinjet could land, with airport altitude on the vertical axis and available landing distance on the horizontal axis. The data bifurcated between the two aircraft at about 5,000-foot runway lengths, with the Global 7500 able to land on runways as short as about 3,800 feet, including a 40% safety margin and dry conditions with wind. This results in the Global 7500 having about a 30% runway performance advantage over the competitor.

Internally, the engineering flight test team challenged the sales engineering team to look at different runway and wind conditions—dry conditions without wind and wet runways with and without wind—to validate the data for dry runways with wind. After rerunning the data with these variables, the output matched, showing that the Global 7500 indeed has a similar advantage in these differing conditions.