Flight International – 11 June 2019

44 | Flight International | 11-17 June 2019 flightglobal.com

PARIS

Special report

JON HEMMERDINGER BOSTON

After selling the CSeries and Dash 8 and declaring business jets to be its future, regional

aircraft may soon be another chapter in the history of Canada’s aerospace champion

Commercial break

B

ombardier enters this year’s Paris air

show with a significantly diminished

commercial presence after closing the

sale of its Dash 8 turboprop pro-

gramme to an affiliate of Viking Air. The deal

brought Canada’s biggest manufacturer one

step closer to exiting the commercial aircraft

business altogether.

It leaves the CRJ as the lone product in

Bombardier’s once-flush commercial portfo-

lio. But the CRJ’s future under Bombardier ap-

pears as tenuous as any. On 5 June, it emerged

that Mitsubishi Aircraft has been in advanced

discussions with the Canadian company

about acquiring the rights to the 50- to 100-

seat aircraft family and its lucrative aftermar-

ket footprint, and planning an announcement

at the show.

Prior to being spurred into responding to

press speculation about the talks on 5 June,

Bombardier had been keeping a low profile.

That, says Addison Schonland, partner at

consultancy AirInsight Group, was due to un-

certainty surrounding the programme.

NEXT STEPS

Bombardier has 46 CRJ900s on backlog;

enough to keep production humming through

until the end of 2020 at least. The company’s

most recent CRJ deal was the sale in February

of nine CRJ900s to Halifax, Nova Scotia-based

Chorus Aviation, parent of Air Canada’s re-

gional airline affiliate Jazz. But orders have

been sparse amid relentless competitive pres-

sure from Embraer’s E-Jet, which has largely

supplanted the CRJ as the darling of US re-

gional airlines.

The Bombardier of today might have been

unimaginable several years ago, when the

company had a healthier regional jet line, a

strong turboprop business and ambitious

goals for a technology-advancing narrowbody

named CSeries. But costs surged as CSeries

development progressed, straining Bombar-

dier’s coffers. Then Boeing, seeing a threat to

its 737-700, sought to squash the rival with a

suit filed with US trade officials. Boeing al-

leged Bombardier, backed with $4.5 billion in

government cash infusions and other subsi-

dies, sold the CSeries to Delta Air Lines at ar-

tificially low prices, harming 737-700 sales.

To the surprise of many, Bombardier won

that trade dispute. But it set in motion what

has become an unravelling of Bombardier’s

commercial aircraft unit. Even before the

trade case ended, Bombardier announced it

would give Airbus – free of charge – majority

CSeries ownership in exchange for marketing

and product support.

That deal closed shortly before last year’s

Farnborough air show, and saw Airbus re-