Raytheon's Hawker Horizon presages a new breed of mid-size business jet
Over the past few years, the competition between Bombardier and Gulfstream has dominated much of business aviation's product news. But while all that was going on, Raytheon Aircraft Corporation had been at work defining anew airplane for the niche below the realm of the global behemoths. The new Hawker Horizon, unveiled at last November's National Business Aircraft Association convention, will be a "super mid-size" airplane designed to fly as fast as 0.84 Mach and as far as 3,300 nautical miles with NBAA IFR fuel reserves. According to Raytheon, the Horizon will have a standard-conditions balanced field length of 5,250 feet, be able to climb directly to 41,000 feet at its maximum gross takeoff weight of 36,000 pounds, and have a stand-up cabin capable of as many as 12 seats. And, yes, a galley and flushing lavatory are standard equipment.
First flight of the Horizon is set for 1999, with certification to follow in the spring of 2001.
The Horizon is the replacement for the Hawker 1000 — an airplane that wasn't much bigger or faster than its Hawker 800XP stablemate (see "Turbine Pilot: The Hawker 800's Next Step," October 1995 Pilot) but carried a price tag some $3 million higher. With those kinds of specs, it's no wonder that the 1000 was a sales dud. Of the 52 1000s sold, 22 went to Executive Jet International for use in its NetJets fleet of fractionally owned business jets. Sources indicate that the last handful of 1000s probably went out the door for considerably less than their normal $12.7 million price tags.
With the Horizon, Raytheon opens a wider gap between it and the company's popular, mid-size Hawker 800XP. First off, it's significantly larger than its predecessor, both inside and out. The airplane will be 14.5 feet longer than the 1000; the wing will be of a new, supercritical design with an area of 510 square feet (the 1000's is 374 square feet); and the engines will be more powerful.
The Horizon will have newly designed Pratt & Whitney Canada PW308A turbofans of 6,575 pounds static thrust, flat rated to produce that power in conditions as warm as ISA plus 20 degrees Celsius at sea level. Because its thermodynamic thrust rating is on the order of 8,000 pounds, the Horizon's PW308A engines won't be working at nearly their full capacity, and maintenance recommendations reflect this. TBO is projected at 6,000 hours, with hot section inspections at 3,000-hour intervals. Thanks to aerodynamic improvements in the PW308A's core section, thrust-specific fuel consumption levels will be some 7 percent less than those of the PW305-series engines used on the Learjet 60. The engines will be digitally controlled via a dual-channel FADEC (full authority digital engine control) that incorporates automatic trend monitoring. With a FADEC system, computers set power precisely. For example, pilots need only advance the thrust levers to click stops for takeoff and cruise power; the FADEC does the fine-tuning. Autothrottle functions, provided by the Horizon's Honeywell FMZ-2000 flight management system (FMS), regulate airspeed and vertical profiles through autopilot inputs.
Honeywell's new Primus Epic avionics suite will grace the Horizon's cockpit. It's this equipment that really marks the airplane's technological leadership. Born of technology developed for the Boeing 777, the Epic includes five 8 X 10-inch color liquid crystal displays. Primary flight, navigation, communications, flight planning, weather, EICAS (engine information and crew advisory system), and noncritical systems operations can be presented, called up, or performed by using cursor- or joystick-controlled interactive softkey-driven menus portrayed at the margins of the Epic's multifunction displays. Honeywell envisions the tuning of radio frequencies using cursor controls, and even says that a voice command system (VCS) may be able to let pilots call up frequencies by merely pronouncing them. The whole idea is to move pilots away from the intensive heads-down time and distraction of using a traditional user-hostile, pedestal-mounted FMS.
The Epic is served by three modular computers that have processing, database storage, and power supply functions. Instead of the multitude of heavy, wire-laden, maintenance-intensive black boxes of the past, the Epic's architecture uses these multiple, linked computers to perform its functions. And although the Epic outperforms today's systems, Honeywell says that the Epic will weigh 100 pounds less than the competition and cost 30 percent less. Inasmuch as the Epic is still very much in the drawing board stage, final specifications, configuration, and capabilities of the system have yet to be confirmed.
Other Honeywell components include integrated maintenance testing and a portable, personal maintenance access terminal (PMAT). The PMAT can download engine and maintenance-related information and let pilots modem the results. The PMAT can also serve as a valuable preflight tool, allowing pilots to calculate weight and balance and reference speeds, perform flight planning functions, and download weather and other information from private vendors.
Equally noteworthy is Raytheon's decision to fabricate the Horizon's fuselage of composites. Carbon fiber-impregnated tape is placed on a fuselage mold for this process, which employs a computer-operated tape placement machine. Then the fuselage components are cured in autoclaves, freed of their molds, and assembled. With this procedure Raytheon claims significant weight and time savings. "It's the way all airplanes will be built in the future," says Raytheon President Roy Norris. The same techniques will be used to assemble the fuselages of Raytheon's Premier I light business jet — an airplane that will be built concurrently with the Horizon. This automated method of composite layup reduces traditional build time from 7 days (the time it took to make a Beech Starship fuselage by using manual layup) to one.
High-tech is fine, but the traditional Hawker virtues — cabin comfort and style — still will be the dominant first impression to those sitting in back. You know, the ones paying the bills. The Horizon's cabin will be 60 percent bigger than the 800XP's, Raytheon says, and 3 feet longer than the 1000's. Gone will be the side-facing divan that used to distinguish most Hawker interiors, in favor of a standard eight-seat setup in a double-club arrangement. Cabin height will be 6 feet, and there'll be a flat floor — no dropped center aisles here, Raytheon says.
At $14.5 million, the Horizon should compete very favorably against airplanes like the new Cessna Citation X ($15.3 million), the Falcon 50EX ($15.8 million), and the Falcon 2000 ($18 million). However, the Citation X's cabin is a good bit smaller than the Horizon's is projected to be, and it remains to be seen whether Horizon prospects will pop extra millions for the extra cabin size and greater range of the Falcons. Most business jet operators fly shorter routes of no more than transcontinental distance.
Most important, Hawker owners just love that cabin. Ever since the first Viper-powered Hawker-Siddeleys rolled off the line in 1963, Hawker business jets were known as much for their comfy seats and easygoing, friendly interior ambiance as they were for their honest handling and ram's horn control columns. With 900 total Hawker sales and counting, Raytheon knows better than to mess with a basic formula for success.
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