French Navy gets new Falcon Albatros surveillance aircraft

France’s defense procurement agency has delivered the first two Falcon 2000 LXS Albatros maritime surveillance aircraft to the French Navy, the agency said in a social media post.

The Direction générale de l’armement, or DGA, said the aircraft are headed to Flottille 24F, a French Navy air squadron based at Lann-Bihoué in Brittany. The delivery is the first hardware handover under the AVSIMAR program, which will eventually field 12 Albatros aircraft built by Dassault Aviation for maritime patrol and rescue work.

The Albatros is built on Dassault’s Falcon 2000LXS business jet, a twin-engine aircraft with a range of roughly 7,400 km (4,000 nautical miles) and low-speed handling that lets it operate from smaller airfields. For the Navy version, Dassault fitted a radar under the fuselage, a high-performance optronic turret for visual tracking, observation windows for crew members to scan the water below, and a system for dropping search-and-rescue kits to people or vessels in distress.

The sensor package draws on several French suppliers. Thales provides the SearchMaster surveillance radar, the TopAXYZ inertial navigation system, the TopStar 100-2 military GPS receiver and the TopShield anti-jamming antenna system. Safran Electronics & Defense supplies the Euroflir 410 electro-optical and infrared camera turret. Dassault developed the aircraft with Naval Group and Safran as program partners.

The Navy expects the Albatros to handle three main jobs: patrolling French waters, gathering electromagnetic intelligence and identifying threats, and hunting submarines. France controls roughly 11 million square km of exclusive economic zone, the world’s second-largest maritime area after the United States, which the Navy says requires an aircraft capable of sustained, wide-area surveillance.

The 12 Albatros aircraft will replace eight Falcon 50M and five Falcon 200 Gardian aircraft that have flown maritime patrol missions for French naval aviation for decades. The Falcon 50Ms fly out of Lann-Bihoué in western France’s Morbihan region, while the Falcon 200 Gardians are based in the Pacific, supporting French territories there. Retirement of the older aircraft began in 2025 as the newer jets came closer to entering service.

France ordered the first seven Albatros aircraft in December 2020, under a contract that also commits Dassault to a 10-year guaranteed availability clause for maintenance support. The DGA placed a second order for five more aircraft in September 2025, completing the planned 12-aircraft buy.

The first Albatros made its maiden flight from Bordeaux-Mérignac in January 2025, and the type has since been going through testing at the DGA’s flight test center in Istres, in southern France.

The French Navy has previously said it expects the Albatros fleet to reach initial operational capability by the end of 2026, though a full delivery schedule for the remaining 10 aircraft has not been made public.