The firm order placed by Deutsche Lufthansa late this past winter for 30 Bombardier CS100 airliners not only gave the much-maligned C Series its first confirmed customer, it granted the executives at Bombardier Commercial Airplanes (Chalets A365, A366) some measure of vindication after eight months of persistent questions about whether the program would ever yield a prototype. After all, by the time the Bombardier’s fiscal year had ended on January 31, the project’s industrial launch had become a six-month-old memory, and the lack of a promised firm order began to chip away at the project’s credibility with each passing day.
Meanwhile, as the global economic downturn had turned into a full-blown crisis, some of the doubters began to gather an increasingly sympathetic audience, particularly after Qatar Airways publicly acknowledged that talks over a possible C Series order had broken down, at least temporarily.
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