Story ID: 
Global 5000 makes debut at Farnborough
By: AIN Staff
Caption: Just days after receiving airworthiness certification from Transport Canada, Bombardier’s first Global 5000 with a finished interior made its debut at the 
Word Count: 1409
Just days after receiving airworthiness certification from Transport Canada, Bombardier’s first Global 5000 with a finished interior made its debut at the Farnborough Air Show (held July 19 to 25), where it was also announced that the Canadian-built business jet has received European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) certification.
Certification was the highlight, but Bombardier made much of the new cabin. “Customers told us what they wanted,” said Marc Bouliane, Bombardier product manager for the Global line of aircraft. “And one of the things they wanted was a more comfortable cabin.”
At Farnborough, visitors saw a typical Global 5000 interior, with the exception of some flight-test equipment in place of the two starboard side forward seats. Bouliane, however, emphasized that “typical” is an inadequate description.By reducing the size of the aft lavatory and forward galley, designers came up with an actual seating area just 10 inches shorter than the equivalent seating area in the larger Global Express.
The Global 5000, with 6 feet 3 inches of headroom, a width of 8 feet 2 inches and length of 42 feet 3 inches, has 315 sq ft of floor area–71 sq ft more than the Dassault Falcon 900EX and 72 sq ft more than the Gulfstream 450.
The cabin is designed to present three distinct seating zones, each about nine feet in length. In the aircraft shown at Farnborough, the forward zone is in a typical double-club configuration, while the center zone offers a conference-room layout with four seats separated by a work or dining table and a sidewall credenza. The aft zone has seating for five, with two facing executive chairs on one side of the cabin and a side-facing divan for three people on the opposite side.
The aft zone, said Bouliane, can also be converted to a private bedroom by installation of a cabin divider. The standard three-place divan opens into a 38-inch-wide sleeping berth. By replacing the two seats with a second divan, a full double-bed becomes an option.
Also part of the Global 5000 cabin is a newly designed executive seat with a contoured backrest for upright comfort, which Bouliane said remains comfortable in a reclined position for sleeping. All seats and the side-facing divan meet 16-g standards.
Perhaps more innovative is an optional visco-elastic seat-cushion material that is heat-activated and conforms to individual body shapes. Bombardier has received a technical standard order (TSO) for the new material, which the company says allows for a more comfortable distribution of body weight.
The retractable conference table is supported by a single pedestal, allowing additional legroom. Bifold tables in the club seating arrangements extend from the dado panel rather than from the side ledge, creating greater stability.
While the cabin windows are the same size as those in the GlobalExpress, the upper angle of the window reveal offers a 40-percent increase in the viewing angle by a standing passenger. It also allows more light to enter the cabin.An aft executive lavatory is augmented by an enclosed crew lavatory forward with an optional window. Both lavatories are standard equipment.
All the interior furnishings–seats, sidewalls, tables, ledges and cabinetry–are being provided by subcontractor C&D Aerospace of Huntington Beach, Calif.
LED Cabin Lighting Is StandardGoodrich Hella Aerospace Lighting of Charlotte, N.C., is providing the standard LED interior lighting system on the Global 5000. Bombardier is already offering Goodrich Hella LED interior lighting on the Challenger 300, Learjet 45 and Learjet 45XR and claims the system has a lifespan of 10,000 flight hours.
The 28-gallon potable water system is from Goodrich Hella parent company Goodrich of Lippstadt, Germany, and is similar to the one found in the Global Express. Included is freeze protection in the form of a continuous recirculation system, in-cabin, single-point servicing for quick turnaround, ultraviolet sterilization and charcoal filtration.
The cabin-entertainment system is a customized derivative of the Rockwell Collins Airshow 21 package. It includes complete digital distribution via Ethernet as standard equipment, with optional high-speed Internet connectivity (up to 64 kbps) and dynamic host control protocol servers with built-in aircraft firewall. Aware of rapidly advancing cabin technology, Bombardier designed hardware storage that reserves 25 percent of inputs, outputs and processor usage for the future.
Aircraft air-to-ground communications equipment includes two Aero H+ channels for use with the Inmarsat satellite constellation; an Aero H+ channel for cockpit data; and one channel for use with the Iridium satellite constellation. Bouliane described the Global 5000 as the only business aircraft currently offering high-speed Internet connectivity as standard equipment. Also standard are wired and wireless telephone handsets, printer/fax equipment and laptop file-sharing. Wireless connectivity (IEEE 802.11b) is optional, as is a second high-speed data-transfer channel.
According to Bouliane, the new cabin is the end product of a program that started with approximately 160 customer comments, ranging from “move this a little to the right to a complete lavatory redesign.”
Just as important, he said, Bombardier has learned from early interior completion problems with the Global Express that delayed deliveries by as much as a year. Interior finish work for the Global 5000 is being done at the Bombardier Completion Center in Montreal, which was built to outfit Global Express interiors. But to make the Global 5000 completion process more efficient, interior work actually begins while the aircraft is still on the assembly line. And final flight tests of the aircraft are scheduled to coincide with cabin flight tests.
Bouliane believes the process is already showing results. The aircraft shown at Farnborough entered the completion center in mid-February and was rolled out just 18 weeks later.
Meeting Expectations for a High-Speed BizjetThe Global 5000 began with a set of requirements based on Bombardier studies of market surveys. These included a three-zone cabin; 4,700-nm range; a maximum cruise speed of Mach 0.85; balanced field length of 5,000 feet; price at launch of less than $35 million; and a max cruise altitude of 51,000 feet and initial cruise altitude of 41,000 feet. The Global 5000, said Bouliane, “meets or exceeds all of those goals.”
 The airplane also fills what Bombardier believed was a gap in the product line: a “super large” category niche between the Challenger 604 and the Global Express. This puts the Global 5000 in competition with the Gulfstream 450 and Dassault’s in-development Falcon 7X. The Gulfstream 450 is expected to receive certification later this year. The more apparent competitor is the Falcon 7X, although the new Dassault trijet won’t be certified until late 2006. (See box comparison.)
Comparisons of the Global 5000 with its big brother, the Global Express, are inevitable, and hardly surprising. In designing the Global 5000, Bombardier engineers relied heavily on lessons learned from the Global Express. In fact, said Bouliane, there is 95-percent commonality that the company hopes will make the 5000 more attractive to owners and operators of the Global Express who plan to add an aircraft to their fleet. The attraction is taken further with a common pilot type rating and common maintenance technician type rating.
In a Global 5000 cockpit ergonomically designed to minimize pilot workload, the basic avionics suite is the Honeywell Primus 2000XP with dual flight management systems (FMS), dual Cat II autopilot systems and an automatic flight-control system. The dual electronic flight information system (EFIS) has six 8- by 7-inch multifunction displays.
Standard navigation systems include color weather radar, triple laser gyro inertial reference system, global positioning system, automatic direction finder, an integrated VOR/ILS, distance measuring equipment, TCAS II and ground proximity warning system.
With airworthiness approval from Transport Canada and EASA already in hand, and FAA certification expected later this year, production of the Global 5000 is well under way. The company declined to discuss orders or backlog, and a spokesman said only, “We expect to finalize production needs later this year and we’ll reach full production next year.”
The Global 5000 is the third derivative Bombardier business jet to be certified within the past year. The Learjet 40 and the Challenger 300 were certified late last year. Bombardier sold a total of 89 new business jets of all types in the fiscal year that ended on January 31. That compares favorably with the total of 74 business jets sold in the previous year. With the U.S. economy improving, Bombardier anticipates healthy sales of the new Global 5000.
“The customers told us [the Global 5000] was what they wanted,” said Bouliane, “Now it’s here, and we’re ready.”