34 | Flight International | 10-16 November 2015 flightglobal.com
BUSINESS AVIATION
SPECIAL REPORT
MURDO MORRISON SAVANNAH
CUTAWAY DRAWING TIM HALL
F
or nearly half a century, Gulfstream has
been synonymous with Savannah, and
in recent years the business-jet brand
has grown to dominate the economy of
this compact, riverside city of tree-lined
squares and colonial charms. The company’s
prospects matter for thousands of families, so
you might imagine important new product de-
velopments would be the talk of the town and
beyond. Yet for much of 2013 and 2014 – with-
in its campus of buildings next to Savannah’s
airport – Gulfstream managed to keep a big se-
cret from much of the world: the precise nature
of its P42 project, a launch that the General Dy-
namics subsidiary had been working on for sev-
eral years.
When that programme emerged in October
2014, not as one aircraft but as two, many as-
sumed that the G500 and G600 would replace
the G450 and G550. Gulfstream’s two existing
large-cabin, long-range types, which slot
below the flagship G650 and G650ER, are
around a decade old and face fresh competi-
tion from the likes of the Dassault Falcon 8X.
Instead, Gulfstream further surprised the in-
dustry by stating that, rather than taking the
SPEED MACHINE
The G500 is the first of two top-end jets Gulfstream
added to its range last year. We chart the programme’s
origins, track its progress and assess its prospects
place of the G450 and G550, the G500 and
G600 would be offered alongside the older
aircraft, giving customers an unprecedented
six variants to choose from in the 4,350nm
(8,060km) to 7,500nm segment.RANGE OF DIFFERENCES
In terms of range, the new duo fit between the
G450 and the G550. The G500 – the first of the
two to market with a scheduled entry into ser-
vice of 2018, and the subject of this technical
description – can fly for 5,000nn at Mach 0.85.
The G600, due to enter service a year later, is
able to make 6,200nm at the same speed. The
G550, by contrast, can cope with 6,750nm, but
at a slightly slower M0.8, while the G450 offers
4,350nm, also at M0.8. All four stop short of
the G650’s range of 7,000nm at M0.85, while
the newer, top-of-the-range G650ER can go
even further: 7,500nm, also at M0.85. Maxi-
mum operating speed for the G500 and G600 is
M0.925, the same as the G650.While these nuances are, of course, crucial
to flight departments, the G500 and G600
bring a lot else to the party in terms of innova-
tion. For a start, they have an all-new fuselage:
Gulfstream now uses three different ‘tubes’ for
its three families of long-range aircraft. The
G500 and G600 are wider and come with more
headroom than the G450/G550, with a 2.41m
(7.9ft) cabin cross-section and cabin height of
1.93m. This compares with the 2.26m-wide
and 1.89m-high G450 and G550. They use en-
gines from Pratt & Whitney Canada rather than
Gulfstream’s long-running vendor Rolls-
Royce, and, for the first time on Gulfstream
aircraft, active control, fly-by-wire sidesticks.
Gulfstream’s Scott Neal, senior vice-presi-
dent of worldwide sales and marketing, dis-
misses suggestions that having six types in a
segment of the market where, just a few years
ago, it had three, will confuse customers or
simply dilute sales that Gulfstream would
have secured anyway. “We are very comforta-Gulfstream kept details of its G500 and
G600 firmly under wraps until last year
Gulfstream