Jet Aviation St. Louis (formerly Midcoast Aviation) has completed the first wide-area augmentation system (Waas) FMS installation in a Dassault Falcon 2000, and it did it under a basic FAA field approval rather than obtaining a full supplemental type certificate (STC).
The upgrade involved replacing the airplane’s existing Universal Avionics flight management systems with dual Universal UNS-1Ew units approved for localizer performance with vertical (LPV) approach capability. With assistance from Universal Avionics, Jet Aviation was able to obtain an engineering assisted field approval, an FAA certification process that allows the Universal Waas FMS units to be certified for LPV approach capability under the Form 337 field approval process rather than a full STC, which includes submittal of individual “issue papers” describing the work to be performed and considerable downtime.