Gulfstream Aerospace brought the lone flying test article of its new G500 large-cabin business jet to Las Vegas Henderson Executive Airport this week for NBAA 2015. Test pilot Scott Evans told AIN that Gulfstream has made good progress with the completely fly-by-wire aircraft. “As far as the control laws and the control law development, we are exactly where we want to be,” he reported. “We are building on something that is a known entity [the G650] to us.”
Evans, who has been with the program for six years, said that flying the G500 is virtually indistinguishable from flying the G500’s immersive flight simulator. “We've increased the visual display area in the simulator,” it makes it “kind of like Imax for airplanes,” he explained. “We've done more wind-tunnel tests on this airplane than we have done in the past.”
Evans added that any dissimilarities between the aircraft and the simulator in the lab are incorporated into the lab so “at this point the lab flies just like the airplane. It gives us a lot of capability once we get to that point."
Mark Kohler, Gulfstream's vice president for advanced aircraft programs, said that the aircraft has reached Mach 0.995 and 50,000 feet in test flights to date, on its way to certification goals of maximum speed of 0.925 Mach and 51,000 feet. Two other test aircraft, along with two production articles and one fatigue article are currently in various stages of build.
Gulfstream (Booth C9406) remains on track to certify the aircraft in 2017 and begin customer deliveries in 2018, Kohler said. A production article, P1, should fly with a complete production interior by the middle of next year, he said. To date T1 has made 44 flights and logged 160 hours since its first flight in May. Its longest flight to date was 5 hours, 22 minutes.
According to Kohler, the first G600, the G500’s longer sibling, is coming together in Savannah and remains on track for first flight in 2017, certification in 2018 and deliveries in 2019.
