It took a while for the message to register, but Bombardier finally heeded the airline market’s counsel in late January and shelved its languishing C Series program. Although it will retain a staff of about 50 for studies on a small mainline jet, the company has begun shifting most of the financial and human resources once dedicated to the C Series to other programs, most notably studies on a new 90- to 100-seat regional jet. It has also begun looking into a possible stretch of the 86-seat CRJ900, labeled internally the CRJ900X, along with a longer variant of the 78-seat Q400 turboprop.
Although the announcement doesn’t necessarily spell the end of the C Series, it does erase any ambiguity about Bombardier’s desire to mount a stronger challenge to Embraer in the upper reaches of the regional aircraft market. By the start of the year the Brazilian manufacturer carried a backlog of some 367 commercial jets, including 208 Embraer 190s and 195s–airplanes that occupy the very capacity segment from which Bombardier remains conspicuously absent.
