Did you know we have a Dassault Falcon Service (DFS) line station in Dakar, Senegal? One of our Asian-Pacific customers was glad to learn about this support location when their Falcon 7X became intimately acquainted with a piece of ground equipment in Conakry.
Where’s Conakry, you ask?
Conakry is the capital of Guinea in West Africa and a port city on a peninsula jutting into the Atlantic Ocean. It’s not a high volume destination for Falcons, but that matters not. It’s one of thousands of spots around the globe where we’ve got you covered.
As soon as we heard about this incident at the Falcon Command Center, we launched a GoTeam from Dakar headed by Moussa Sylla, one of our highly experienced DFS maintenance technicians. He has 15 years’ experience working on Falcons, including six years at DFS Le Bourget, and now supports Falcon operators based in West Africa.
Moussa saw that the poor 7X in Conakry had extensive damage. That’s when our Falcon Command Center, now in Bordeaux-Mérignac, took corrective action. Their move to a new building in Mérignac, helps the Command Center actively coordinate with the engineering organization. In this case, it was key to the repair of the 7X.
Dassault Structural Engineering approved a temporary repair plan to replace inboard and outboard flaps prior to ferry. To speed repairs, these items were dispatched on board a FalconResponse Falcon 900 with a second GoTeam, including a sheet metal repair engineer.
The ferry flight was accomplished with planning support from Dassault’s pilot ops group, which arranged special license validation from the 7X’s country of registration, and special planning due to Covid restrictions.
The damaged 7X was quickly at Dassault’s TAG Maintenance Services MRO facility in Sion, Switzerland, for final repairs, including a fuel tank panel replacement. Six weeks later, the aircraft was back in operation—a couple of days earlier than promised.
I share this story because it is a compelling demonstration of a “whole of Dassault” response: from our AOG GoTeams, our Command Center and co-located engineering and support organization; Dassault Spares, Falcon Response, our MRO organization, the flight operations group in Paris -and above all from talented, experienced people like Moussa based all over the world and ready to do whatever it takes, wherever their service is needed.
I couldn’t be prouder of this team. If you haven’t heard, they helped us reach our number one ranking in the AIN Product Support Survey a third consecutive year.
I’m also looking forward to this year’s NBAA-BACE in Las Vegas. It will be such a pleasure to be face to face with customers again. I’ll be there. I hope you will be, too.
Jean Kayanakis
Senior Vice President, Worldwide Falcon Customer Service & Service Center Network
Dassault Aviation