Let's have a look at Every Jetliner Ever Made. In alphabetical order, but with Airbus and Boeing at the end otherwise it would be boring. This week, Bombardier Aviation of Canada. Bomb-bar-deer, or Bomb-bar-dee-yay?
Apparently the latter. It was founded in the 1930s by Joseph-Armand Bomb-bar-dee-yay of Quebec, which explains why the company has such a curiously warlike name for a Canadian company. At first Bombardier specialised in snowmobiles, but it went on to be one of those classic 1960s conglomerates that made everything, at various times selling snowmobiles, business jets, buses, trains, and, yes, jetliners.
During its time as a jetliner company Bombardier only produced two basic designs, but one of them was very popular, nay era-defining.
BOMBARDIER (Canada)
Bombardier's thing was regional jets. Regional jets were so hot in the 1990s and early 2000s. They were so hot. Aviation fuel was cheap and people wanted to go on holiday. What is a regional jet?
There's a fundamental difference between the commercial aviation market in the United States and Britain. In the UK I can fly directly to any European destination from essentially any large airport. Edinburgh, for example, has low-cost flights to the Canary Islands. The thought of flying from (for example) Exeter Airport to London Gatwick and then on to Rome is alien and strange.
But what if I lived in Cleveland? I don't, but imagine if I did. I would be a completely different person, but humour me. I would be hard and mean. Imagine if I lived in Cleveland and I wanted to go to Athens. To get away from Cleveland.
Cleveland doesn't have flights to Athens. It doesn't. I've looked. It does however have flights to New York. If I could just get to New York first, I would be able to go to Athens. But how to get to New York? In theory I could drive, but it would take ten hours. And the United States doesn't do trains. So I'd have to fly. And I would not be alone, because Cleveland and its surrounding area has a population of over three million people, and Cleveland is just one city.
Suffice it to say that in the United States the thought of flying from one city to another to catch a second flight somewhere else is not unusual.
It's called the hub-and-spoke model. The smaller airports are spokes, the larger airports are hubs. As a consequence the US has a substantial market for super-small jetliners that can cover short distances without using too much fuel. They're called regional jets, sometimes feederliners, and that's where Bombardier comes in.
And Fokker, and De Havilland Canada, and Embraer, and BAe, and very briefly Dornier. All of those companies specialise or specialised in small regional aircraft that could fly between cities in the United States. The hub-and-spoke model also operates in South America and Asia, but I have the impression that Asian carriers prefer larger, full-sized airliners.
Up until the 1990s regional routes were usually covered by turboprops, such as the De Havilland Canada Dash 8 pictured above, but turboprops have some disadvantages, limited cruising altitude, slow speed, and noisy engines among them. Furthermore there was a perception in the 1990s that turboprops were old-fashioned. When questioned, passengers frequently expressed a preference for jets, and in 1993 Comair, a subsidiary of Delta Airlines, took the bold step of ordering a batch of regional jets from Bombardier, which opened the floodgates for other airlines to do the same thing.
Sub-100-seat regional jets went on to become a huge and hyper-competitive market in the 1990s, largely killing off turboprops. Dornier struggled to introduced a regional jet, and although Fokker had a head start with the F28 Fellowship, which pioneered the concept, the development cost of their own modern regional jet left them heavily in debt.
Britain is too small for the hub-and-spoke model to make any sense, and continental Europe has a high-speed rail network that's generally cheaper than an airline ticket, but a few European airlines do use regional jets. Scandinavian, for example, has a fleet of Bombardier CRJs, as does Lufthansa. Regional jets make a certain amount of sense on the edges of Europe, especially the Nordic area, where the population is widely spread out.
After the failure of Dornier and Fokker, and the withdrawal of Saab and BAE Systems from the regional market, the two remaining players in the immediate pre-COVID period were Bombardier of Canada and Embraer of Brazil. Following behind them were the Franco-Italian ATR and De Havilland Canada, but they make turboprops so for the purposes of this document I'm going to pretend they don't exist. I'll cover Embraer in a separate document, but suffice it to say that they were Bombardier's arch-rivals during the 1990s and 2000s.
Bombardier's regional jet programme was something of an accident. In 1986 the company purchased Canadair, a state-owned aircraft manufacturer that had a line of sleek business jets. Unfortunately Canadair had overspent on the development of the Challenger 600 business jet and was facing financial ruin. The Canadian government agreed to forget about Canadair's debts if Bombardier would take the company off its hands, and so Bombardier suddenly became an aircraft manufacturer. At the suggestion of one of Canadair's executives Bombardier decided to investigate the possibility of stretching the Challenger 600 into a small regional airliner. Bombardier decided to keep the Canadair name, and thus the Canadair Regional Jet was born, CRJ for short.
The first CRJ was launched in 1991. Bombardier had gambled that the current batch of turboprop airliners were getting long in the tooth, and as mentioned earlier in the article the CRJ was given a huge boost by an order from Comair, who became one of the launch customers. Comair went on to order 110 CRJ100s, becoming the type's main operator.
The CRJ100 had the same configuration as the Challenger business jet, with two rear-mounted engines and a T-tail. A classic configuration for smaller airliners, with the benefit of keeping the engines away from runway debris while allowing for shorter landing gear. The biggest Bombardier business jet, the Challenger 650, could seat around twenty passengers, but the CRJ100 was much larger, with a passenger capacity of fifty people in a 2x2 arrangement, and a range of around 1,500-2,000 miles depending on the model, conceptually similar to the Douglas DC-9 or BAC 1-11, but with a much smaller passenger load.
Production of the CRJ100 was modest, amounting to only a couple of hundred sales, including 110 to Comair and 35 to Lufthansa of Germany. However in 1996 Bombardier launched the CRJ200, which had more efficient engines. It sold like hot cakes, and of the 1,000 or so CRJs ever made the production ratio was about 7:3 CRJ200s to CRJ100s. They were mostly bought by airlines in the US, predominantly Northwest Airlines and Skywest. Production continued until 2006.
By the late 1990s the CRJ100/200 was joined by the CRJ700. It had a shorter range than the CRJ200 but carried around 50% more passengers, around 70-80 or so, with the same two-engines-at-the-back configuration. The launch customer was Brit Air of France, who began operations in February 2001. During the 2000s Bombardier also released a pair of stretched versions of the CRJ700, the CRJ900 (2003) and CRJ1000 (2007), which carried around 90 and 100 passengers respectively. The three of them also sold around 1,000 units, the bulk of production being CRJ900s and CRJ700s.
There was also a pair of oddities, the CRJ550 and 705, which were essentially CRJ700s and 900s with fewer seats. There was no real technical reason for this; they existed because some airlines in the United States were contractually forbidden from operating regional jets that carried more than a certain amount of passengers.
The 100-seat CRJ1000 was the top of the range, but it wasn't particularly popular. For legal reasons regional operators in the United States were prohibited from using it, but conversely it was too small for most customers in Europe, who were gravitating towards uniform fleets of Boeing 737s and Airbus A320s. Development problems delayed its first paying flights until 2011, and production only continued until 2020. A year later the CRJ line was sold off to Mitsubishi of Japan, who continue to provide parts and support for CRJs, although the company has no plans to restart production.
Nonetheless the CRJ1000 had lit a fire within Bombardier. There was a general trend in the industry for regional jets to grow and grow in size, so Bombardier decided to jump up a tier and release a full-sized airliner. A miniature full-sized airliner. It was launched in 2013 as the CS100. It had two engines mounted under the wings and a conventional tail, just like a Boeing 737 or Airbus A320 or indeed the contemporary Embraer E-Jet, albeit that the E-Jet had a big head start, entering service in 2004.
The CS100 had a passenger load of around 120 people, with a range of 3,500 miles, considerably more than the CRJ. It was joined in 2016 by the CS300, which carried around 150 passengers, more than the original Boeing 737.
The CS100/300 was controversial. Until that point Bombardier - and Embraer, and all the other regional aircraft manufacturers - had avoided directly competing with Airbus and Boeing. And, technically, the CS100 didn't step on the toes of those two manufacturers, although Boeing still took legal action against Bombardier for selling CS100s to Delta Airlines at a keen price.
The Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 loom large in the world of aviation. They were both originally developed as small airliners that could carry a useful passenger load across the United States or Europe, but over time they have been stretched and re-engined to a point where they can cover transatlantic routes at a punch. They have greater range and more capacity than the four-engined jetliners of the early 1960s, and in fact Norwegian Airlines briefly flew 737s across the Atlantic from Ireland to the US east coast in the pre-COVID years. Conversely they can still fly the shorter routes for which they were originally designed without being a waste of fuel.
Bombardier reasoned that the 737 had grown too large for some carriers, so the CS100 was intended to slot in underneath it. Unfortunately, despite their best efforts, regional airlines in the United States ignored it, and sales have mostly been to European and African carriers, so in 2017 Bombardier sold the design to Airbus, who now make it as the Airbus A220-100 and A220-300.
As of this writing the A220 is still a going concern, although its reception has been muted. The appearance of COVID in 2020 did nothing to help. The A220 has sold around three hundred units, with firm orders for five hundred more. That's nowhere near the amount of orders won by the Boeing 737 or Airbus 320 over the same period, but it's not bad. Perhaps in a world of uncertainty over infectious diseases and climate change there's room for a smaller, more flexible alternative.
And that's Bombardier. As mentioned earlier the original CRJ range was sold off to Mitsubishi, and the CS100 was sold to Airbus, so the company no longer makes jetliners. It does however still make business jets. The largest, the Global 7500, has a passenger capacity of around 19, too small for this document, but it's notable for an extraordinary range of almost 8,000 miles, which competes favourably with most full-sized jetliners. From 1990 until 2021 Bombardier also made the famous Learjet, which is also not an airliner but looks fantastic, viz:
