At about 21:40 on Sunday 27 September 2026, a red dot appeared on the little radar on my desk and stayed there. The label read Dassault Falcon 6X, serial 290, callsign IRL290, 41,000 feet. It was on screen for over two minutes, level the whole time. There was no route on the label.

Why the dot was red

My screen draws military aircraft that broadcast as a red dot. That is useful, but it comes with a limit: the screen only sees what an aircraft broadcasts over ADS-B, and plenty of military aircraft don't broadcast at all. A red dot is the exception, not the rule. It also means I can tell you what 290 is, and how high it was, but not where it was going. The tracker showed no route, and I'm not going to guess.

What the screen told me

The label gave the type, Dassault Falcon 6X, and the serial, 290, on its own line. The callsign underneath, IRL290, ends in the same number. My footage has it on screen from about 71 seconds into the clip to about 196 seconds, so roughly two minutes, and the altitude never moved from 41,000 feet. The dot drifted across the outer rings of the screen rather than passing straight over the middle. A level cruise at that height is what you would expect from a business jet that isn't climbing or descending, but I have no way to say more than that.

What 290 is

Serial 290 is a Dassault Falcon 6X, manufacturer's serial number 27. It left Dassault's delivery centre at Paris Le Bourget on 16 December 2025 and arrived at Casement Aerodrome, Baldonnel, which is where the Air Corps is based. The Minister for Defence welcomed it as the Air Corps' new "strategic reach" aircraft.

It replaces a Learjet 45, serial 258, which the Air Corps received new in 2003. The Falcon 6X is a good deal bigger: the Department of Defence lists capacity for 14 passengers, and ch-aviation gives its range as more than 5,500 nautical miles. When ch-aviation reported the delivery, it noted that Ireland was only the second country to operate the 6X in a government transport role, after Serbia in 2025.

What it is for

The obvious job is ministerial transport, and the Learjet did that. The Department of Defence's own description is broader. It says the aircraft will be used for evacuating Irish citizens from critical situations, air-ambulance patient transfers, the medical evacuation or repatriation of Defence Forces personnel on overseas missions, and carrying supplies to those missions.

The aircraft itself

The Falcon 6X is a twin-engined business jet with two Pratt & Whitney Canada PW812D engines. It first flew on 10 March 2021 and was certified by the FAA and EASA in August 2023. Its maximum altitude is 51,000 feet, so 41,000 feet is comfortably inside what it can do. Its cabin is 2.58 metres wide, billed as the widest in a purpose-built business jet.

The photographs here are of another Falcon 6X, the French-registered F-WSIX, and an Air Corps Learjet 45. I couldn't find a photograph of 290 itself under a licence I can use, so I haven't pretended that any of them are.

Sources