Bombardier’s latest and biggest jet suffers another setback

With the debut of its newest, biggest jet running late, the last thing Bombardier needed was another problem.

One arrived anyway after an engine on the CSeries caught fire during ground tests, adding to the setbacks for a model already plagued by delays and rising development costs. The plane’s carbon fibre composite wings are manufactured at the company’s Belfast plant with 800 people expected to be employed in making the wings when full production begins.

Bombardier invested £520 million (€640 million) at the former Short Brothers plant to manufacture the wings and about 200 companies in Ireland and the UK are involved in the supply chain.

Damage

The plane, Bombardier’s Flight Test Vehicle 1, also suffered damage on May 29th at the company’s facility in Mirabel, Quebec, said Marc Duchesne, a spokesman.

Canada’s Transportation Safety Board is gathering evidence and will decide by tomorrow whether to conduct a full investigation, according to Julie Leroux, a spokeswoman.

Any time lost in flight trials would extend the struggles for a plane that Bombardier envisions producing as much as $8 billion in annual revenue later this decade. Orders for the plane haven’t met Bombardier’s target, and few major airlines have embraced a jet that the company bills as a challenger to Boeing Co and Airbus Group NV aircraft.

“This news is unlikely to help sentiment in the CSeries,” Robert Stallard, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets in New York, wrote in a note to clients.

Stallard also said the incident may raise questions about the plane’s new engines, the geared turbofan model from United Technologies Corp’s Pratt and Whitney unit. “We hope the investigation will proceed quickly so that we can resume flight tests as soon as possible,” Duchesne said.

Bombardier is being assisted in investigating the incident by Pratt and Whitney. More than 4,000 hours of engine testing have been conducted since trials began in September 2010, according to Bombardier’s website. The company has said the CSeries will cost about 15 percent less to operate and produce less noise.

The aircraftmaker’s Class B stock dropped 2.4 per cent to C$3.69 at the close in Toronto on Friday. Bombardier’s biggest customer for the CSeries, Republic Airways Holdings said recently it’s considering whether to take the planes after a change in airline strategy.

“The whole point of ‘testing’ an aircraft is to find out if everything works perfectly – and then fix it before it enters service,” Stallard said. “We’ve seen other testing issues in the past, but ultimately the issues have been addressed and the aircraft has entered operation. We expect this to be the case with the GTF.”

Test flights

Bombardier is planning 2,400 hours of test flights for the CSeries. As of May 1st, the company had logged about 280 hours of flight tests, or about 12 per cent of the planned total. The FTV1 was the first CSeries prototype to fly, debuting on September 16th.

“It is unlikely in our view that the investigation period would create another delay for the CSeries program,” said Benoit Poirier, an analyst at Desjardins Securities. The CSeries is now targeted for a commercial debut in the second half of next year, following Bombardier’s January 16th announcement that more time was needed to complete flight tests. The aircraft is designed to seat 108 to 160 people. – (Bloomberg)