BOMBARDIER GOES CORPORATE

摘要

Bombardier commercial aviation has left the hangar. Since transferring majority ownership of the CSeries passenger jet to Airbus during a bruising legal tussle with Boeing over price discounting, that the Seattle giant would ultimately lose, Alain Bellemare, Bombardier's chief executive has carved out pieces of the air transport business with surgical precision, including its dwindling regional jet unit to Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and the aerostructures unit to Wichita-based Spirit AeroSystems. The end was inevitable. The rebranded Airbus A220 had already been pushed to the margins of Bombardier's corporate jet and rail portfolios. At a mid-January Air Canada A220 launch event in Montreal, Calin Rovinescu, the airline's chief executive, pointed out that when his airline signed a deal for 45 of the larger CSeries 300 variant in February 2016, it wasn't clear whether the program could survive. From order to delivery, the Air Canada A220 has bookended the most-turbulent period in Canadian aviation and aerospace since the cancellation of the Avro Arrow interceptor in February 1959. And the dust hasn't settled. Bellemare also spoke at the Air Canada event, but did not give a hint of the bombshell Bombardier would drop less than 24 hours later.