Bombardier Focusing on Business Aircraft

Hood

Hood

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Bombardier has announced that it intends to focus on its business aviation, aerostructures and other non-aviation business.

They have sold the Dash 8 programme to Longview Aviation Capital, an affiliate of Viking Air, for $300 million. The CRJ line is still going, but options are still open.

I wonder how much of this is due to the spat with Boeing or how whether it would of happened anyway with the CS programme offered for sale in the longer-term.
It also places a question mark on the future of new turboprop airliners which seem to come in and out of fashion. It would seem to leave ATR in a good position to dominate the future turboprop market.

https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/bombardier-shifts-focus-away-from-commercial-aircraf-453473/
 
Hood said:
Bombardier has announced that it intends to focus on its business aviation, aerostructures and other non-aviation business.

They have sold the Dash 8 programme to Longview Aviation Capital, an affiliate of Viking Air, for $300 million. The CRJ line is still going, but options are still open.

I wonder how much of this is due to the spat with Boeing or how whether it would of happened anyway with the CS programme offered for sale in the longer-term.
It also places a question mark on the future of new turboprop airliners which seem to come in and out of fashion. It would seem to leave ATR in a good position to dominate the future turboprop market.

https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/bombardier-shifts-focus-away-from-commercial-aircraf-453473/
Click to expand...
I don't think it was so much to do with the Boeing spat, more that they have realized the difficulty and expense of expanding their commercial portfolio is a huge drag on company resources if they cannot guarantee healthy sales numbers. To kickstart orders in pretty much any commercial class, they would need something that makes them stand out from the planes already on the market or already in service with plenty of life in them, that means either a price too low to be profitable or a big R&D investment to get fuel burn down.
 
What does this suggest for LAC/Viking Air? Another product support lineage in the form of the Dash 8s? Or will LAC/Viking Air produce and/or further develop the Q400?
 
Bingo. I'm with Tomcat here.

Airbus and ATR are heavily related (can't remember how much exactly, if they merged or not) so the ATR branch of Airbus Group may have pressured the group to remove the Q400 threat, using the Airbus - Cseries deal to put pressure on the canadians.
Something like
"Hey Airbus father, since you made a deal with Bombardier over the C-series, can you pressure them to screw their Q400 ? It is a competitor to our ATR."
 
Wiki:

ATR
Type
Joint venture
Industry Aerospace
Founded 1981
Headquarters Toulouse Blagnac International Airport
Blagnac, France
Key people
Christian Scherer[1] (CEO till Sep. 2018)
Giovanni Tramparulo (CFO)
Revenue 1.8 US$ Billion (2017)[2]
Number of employees
1,300+ (beginning of 2017)[2]
Parent Airbus (50%) Leonardo (50%)
Website atraircraft.com


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATR_(aircraft_manufacturer)
 
I don't think so. Bombardier's commercial aircraft having been selling well for some time, especially the Q400.
I just think the sale of the ambitious CS programme gave them the opening to divest the rest to Viking. I'm sure they will pick up a few sales.
The turboprop market is always hot and cold, one moment its the next big sector and the next nobody is buying anything with propellers. ATR is probably sitting pretty though at the moment.
Can't help thinking if Boeing hadn't made so much fuss that they might have been able to snap up the CS, but their Embraer deal is probably far more profitable and advantageous in the long-term.
 
TomcatViP's notion that this was "the price asked for teaming with Airbus" may be factually accurate but that doesn't mean that Bombardier was unwilling. Hood has it with the sale of the CSeries enabling Bombardier to dump their Commercial Aircraft division.

Every sale from that division represented a money loss for Bombardier. With the Airbus deal, Bombardier turns itself into an airframe supplier with much-lowered risk. Selling the Q400 to LAC/Viking also reduces pressure on the Government of Canada. There was a late 2017 proposal to sell the entire Q400 programme to Shenyang. The GoC probably would have been fine with that ... what Ottawa wanted to avoid was having to explain to their opposites in Beijing why they were opposing the transfer of the CSeries programme to the PRC.

So, Bombardier gets rid of a money-losing division (once it figures out what to do with the CRJ) and frees-up factory floor space in Mexico for the CSeries. (I'm guessing that management also want Bombardier China to focus on rail stock instead of aircraft components.)

But my question remains ... will LAC/Viking resume Q400 production? And, if they did, how do they avoid losing money? Bombardier seems to have concluded that moving all Q400 component construction out of Canada was the only plausible way. I'm guessing that Ottawa's subsidies were all that kept final assembly in Toronto. The GoC unwillingness to use stacks of taxpayers' cash to fill in the hole Bombardier dug with the CSeries was likely the writing on the wall that the Beaudoins needed.
 
How the old Shorts factory in Belfast fares will provide a lot of socio-political commentary and agitation.
 

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