The Bombardier Global Express is a large cabin, 6,000 nmi / 11,100 km range business jet designed and manufactured by Bombardier Aviation (formerly Bombardier Aerospace). Announced in October 1991, it first flew on 13 October 1996, received its Canadian type certification on 31 July 1998 and entered service in July 1999. Initially powered by two BMW/Rolls-Royce BR710s, it shares its fuselage cross section with the Canadair Regional Jet and Challenger 600 with a new wing and tail. The shorter range Global 5000 is slightly smaller and the Global 6000 is updated and has been modified for military missions. The longer range Global 5500/6500 are powered by new Rolls-Royce Pearl engines with lower fuel burn and were unveiled in May 2018. The larger and stretched Global 7500/8000 have longer ranges. Development Project definition After acquiring Canadair along with its Challenger 600 business jet in 1986, Bombardier studied a longer range business aircraft in which it aimed to carry eight passengers and four crew over 12,000 km (6,500 nmi) at Mach 0.85.To meet this goal a joint-definition team was established at the company's Montreal facility in the early 1990s. By 1994, the team comprised 200 engineers, evenly divided between Canadair and various partners, including Japanese company Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Anglo-German engine manufacturer BMW Rolls-Royce. These various partners independently designed their own elements of the aircraft and shared a stake in the program. The choice of suppliers also influenced the aircraft design, with its various systems being selected before the detailed design phase. The CATIA software was used for the kinematics, to feed finite-element analysis software for structural design, and computational fluid dynamics software for aerodynamics, the latter being confirmed by wind tunnel testing. The new aircraft was designed to use the minimum number of components while still ensuring that no single failure would result in a diversion or the inability to dispatch a flight. Bombardier worked towards a 99.5% dispatch reliability goal. As operators sought a level of safety enjoyed by airline aircraft, Bombardier was influenced to use design rules, such as the incorporation of a maintenance computer to detect, indicate, and isolate faults, (although ETOPS rules were not a design requirement). A conventional mechanical flight control system was selected in the new aircraft design instead of fly-by-wire. This was mainly due to the high development expense and customer apprehension of fly-by-wire. Launch and flight testing On 28 October 1991, the