The Strange Genius of the Dassault Falcon 8X.

The Falcon 8X is a very different kind of private jet. Because if you parked one beside a Gulfstream G700 or a Global 7500 and asked a random person which one they wanted, I don't think most people would pick the Falcon. And I understand why. The Gulfstream looks enormous. The Global looks expensive from about 3 miles away. The Falcon 8X? It almost looks like somebody stretched a fighter jet, put a living room inside it, and weirdly enough, that's not very far from the truth. Welcome back to another video. I'm Johnny from Private Planes, and if you're new here, this is where we nerd out about the world of aviation. Hopefully you have some fun and learn something about airplanes along the way. Because the more I've looked into this airplane, the more I've realized that the Falcon 8X isn't really trying to beat Gulfstream or Bombardier at their own game. Dassault seems to have asked a completely different question. Not, how big can we make the cabin, but, how many places can we make this airplane go? And that difference explains almost everything about the 8X. The three engines. The strange wing. The ridiculous landing performance. Even the company that builds it. Because Dassault isn't just a private jet manufacturer. These are the same people responsible for aircraft like the Mirage and the Rafale. So there is actual fighter jet DNA hiding underneath all of this leather and polished wood. And once you know that, the Falcon 8X starts making a lot more sense. The 8X can fly roughly 6,450 nautical miles, which puts cities like New York and Beijing within non-stop range. Singapore to London. London to Sao Paulo. Basically you can spend an entire working day inside this thing and still be nowhere near needing fuel. And that's impressive. But honestly, plenty of expensive private jets can fly very far now. That's no longer the part of the Falcon that interests me. This is. After carrying you across an ocean, the 8X can then land somewhere that you probably wouldn't expect an airplane this size to be going. Take London City Airport. If you've never seen this airport, Google it. It is basically a runway squeezed into the middle of London. And it is not somewhere you'd instinctively want to point an 80-foot-long, 73,000-pound private jet. The approach is steep. The runway is short. There are buildings everywhere. But the Falcon 8X is approved to go in there. And that, to me, is where this airplane becomes interesting. Because imagine you're the person actually buying one of these. You probably don't care that much whether your airplane can theoretically fly another 300 miles. You care whether it can get you closer to where you're actually going. There's no point saving 30 minutes with a faster airplane if you then spend an hour and a half sitting in the back of a Mercedes trying to get into the city. The Falcon approaches at only around 107 knots. For something this large, that is absurdly slow. And it needs roughly 2,220 feet to land under Dassault's published conditions. This is a jet capable of crossing oceans that comes down toward a runway with the manners of something much smaller. And suddenly those three engines don't look quite so old-fashioned anymore. And if you remember airports in the 70s and 80s, three engines didn't look strange at all. The DC-10 had them. The Lockheed L-1011 TriStar had them. Later, the MD-11 had them. Back then, an engine sitting up on the tail didn't look outdated. It looked like serious long-distance hardware. The Falcon 8X almost feels like one of the last echoes of that era. Because yes, three engines in 2026 is weird. Most of aviation has spent decades moving in the opposite direction. The 747 lost to big twins. The A340 disappeared. Modern Gulfstreams use two engines. Modern Globals use two engines. Even Dassault's upcoming Falcon 10X uses two engines. Yet here is the 8X, still proudly carrying a third one on its tail. And I love that. Not because three engines are automatically better. They're obviously more complicated. There are more components to maintain. More things consuming fuel. More things that can eventually send an invoice to the owner. But the 8X was designed around that configuration. Three relatively small Pratt & Whitney engines give Dassault some very useful performance margins. It helps with climb performance. It contributes to those slow, stable approaches. And historically, three engines also gave the Falcon more flexibility over long stretches of ocean. So the third engine isn't there because Dassault forgot what year it is. It is part of the entire personality of the airplane. And personality is something I think private jets have slowly started to lose. It's a little like cars. You could spot an old Cadillac Eldorado from half a parking lot away. Whether you loved it or hated it, nobody was going to mistake it for something else. The Falcon has a bit of that. Look at enough modern business jets, and eventually they begin blending together. Two engines. Swept wings. Massive oval windows. Cream interior. Someone has put an espresso machine somewhere. Fantastic airplane. Next? The Falcon doesn't really look like anything else. Even from behind, you immediately know what you're looking at. And I think part of that comes from Dassault's military background. Their engineers seem almost obsessed with aerodynamics and weight. When they developed the 8X from the earlier Falcon 7X, they wanted more cabin space and about 550 additional nautical miles of range. Normally that means the airplane gets heavier. Pretty straightforward. More airplane equals more weight. Except Dassault redesigned sections of the wing structure and managed to offset much of the added weight. So they stretched the fuselage by about 3.6 feet, added around 3,000 pounds of additional fuel capacity, and kept the empty weight remarkably close to the 7X. That is such a Dassault solution to the problem. Don't just install bigger engines. Don't simply make everything larger. Go through the airplane and start shaving weight out of the structure. And then there is the flight control system. This might be my favorite part of the 8X. The airplane uses digital flight controls based on technology developed through Dassault's military aircraft programs, including the Rafale. Now obviously, flying a Falcon 8X does not suddenly turn your pilot into Maverick. Please do not roll your $60 million conference room upside down. But the basic philosophy is similar. The pilot tells the airplane what they want. Computers interpret those inputs. Then the system commands the flight control surfaces while keeping the aircraft inside a protected operating envelope, which reduces workload for the pilots. But there's another benefit that matters to the 12 people in the back. Smoothness. Because the computers are constantly making tiny corrections. You don't notice any of this. And that's exactly the point. On a 14-hour flight, the best piece of technology might be the one you completely forget exists. And that brings us to the cabin. Because this is probably the least dramatic part of the Falcon 8X. And somehow I mean that as a compliment. It's 42 feet, 8 inches long. Just over 6 feet tall. Around 7 feet, 8 inches wide. You can configure it with three separate living areas. Crew rest, beds, a large galley, and even an aft shower depending on the layout. There can be as many as 32 windows. But if you're looking for the biggest cabin in this category, this isn't it. The Global 7500 is bigger. The G700 is bigger. And personally, I think pretending otherwise misses the entire point of the Falcon. Because Dassault seems more interested in what happens after hour 8. Noise. Air quality. Fatigue. The things that don't look particularly sexy in a brochure, but become extremely important when you've been inside an aluminum tube since breakfast. There's almost something old school about that idea of luxury. Think Pan Am in its prime. The experience wasn't supposed to impress you because somebody had installed the largest screen they could find. The luxury was that everything felt civilized. Quiet. Comfortable. Unhurried. The Falcon seems to understand some of that. Dassault says the cabin averages around 49 decibels on its SIL measurement. They put enormous effort into insulation and vibration control. The air is continuously refreshed. And there is something I find very French about the whole approach. The luxury isn't screaming at you. There isn't some massive feature where you go, look, private jet! It's more subtle than that. It's quiet. It's comfortable. It works. And then, 14 hours later, the airplane drops you onto some ridiculously short runway closer to where you actually wanted to be. That's the Falcon 8X. On paper, it can actually look slightly outdated. Three engines in an era of twins. A narrower cabin than its biggest competitors. A design that evolved from an airplane that first flew more than 20 years ago. If private jets were smartphones, the Falcon 8X probably wouldn't win the spec sheet comparison. Or, if smartphones aren't your preferred reference point, think of one of those old luxury cars that made absolutely no sense on a spreadsheet. An Eldorado wasn't trying to be a BMW. A Lincoln Continental wasn't trying to be a Mercedes. You bought one because it did things its own way. The Falcon feels a little like that. But airplanes don't live on spec sheets. They live in weather. They live on runways. They live at high-altitude airports on hot days. They cross oceans. They carry 12 people who don't particularly care how impressive the aircraft sounded in the sales brochure. They just want to get there. And that is where the Falcon starts making its argument. Dassault says it can operate from places like London City, Lugano, and Le Mole near Saint-Tropez. It can climb to 51,000 feet. It can reach Mach 0.90. It can cross more than 6,000 nautical miles. And somehow, after doing all of that, it can approach slower than some aircraft half its size. That combination is much harder to put into a thumbnail. But if I were spending this kind of money, it's exactly the kind of engineering I'd care about. Because there's one final thing about private aviation that I think gets forgotten. The ultimate luxury isn't a bigger television. It isn't another marble countertop. It isn't having a shower at 45,000 feet. Those things are nice. But the whole reason private jets exist is freedom. You leave when you want. You avoid connections. You fly directly to the airport closest to where you're actually going. And that really goes back to the original promise of the business jet. Back when people heard the name Learjet and immediately understood the idea. Don't build a miniature airliner. Build something that lets you go where you need to go, when you need to go there. The Falcon 8X feels like a much larger, much more sophisticated continuation of that idea. And the Falcon 8X seems almost obsessively designed around that final part. Not just flying farther, but making more of the world accessible when you get there. And maybe that's why the 8X has never needed to be the loudest airplane in the room. It's a little strange. It's definitely different. And I think that's exactly why I like it. Because beneath the leather seats and the champagne and everything we normally associate with a private jet, the Falcon 8X still feels like an engineer's airplane. A very, very luxurious engineer's airplane. But an engineer's airplane nonetheless. And personally, I'd rather have that than another flying hotel.