Nowadays the Falcon can carry a 1500 kg payload of scientific instrumentation and operating personell. The instruments are mounted partly in underwing containers, partly they arr placed below the fuselage. A nose boom is attached for undisturbed turbulence measurements, and air inlets can be used for analysing the composition of atmospheric air with instrumentation placed inside the cabin. Antennas can be mounted on the fuselage, and special optical windows at the top and the bottom of the cabin are used remote sensing applications with cameras and Lidar systems. One of the cabin windows can be replaced by a special target being transparent for microwaves. For measurements in the far infrared wavelength region the radiometer can be placed in a special pressure vessel mounted instead of a bottom window, in this way any inconvenient window can be omitted completely.
Beside other efforts the Falcon was used for ozone and climate related research, for investigations of the dynamics of frontal systems and other meterological prozesses and tropospheric and tropospheric physics and chemistry, for remote sensing of stratospheric trace gases and of earth surface properties. For the recent years the Falcon has been one of the most important DLR major research tools to investigate the effects of emissions from aircraft engines on the atmospheric composition.