Aviation International News senior correspondent Ian Goold has been involved in aerospace since 1964 and in aviation media for more than 40 years. He enjoyed a 20-year career at Flight International magazine, where he was latterly air-transport editor before turning freelance in 1993. A winner of the European Regions Airline Association Hank McGonagle award for excellence in aerospace journalism and a Royal Aeronautical Society Aerospace Journalist of the Year global&nbsp;award, he has edited or contributed to aerospace and aviation magazines, special publications, and websites in Africa, Asia/Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America. Ian entered aerospace as an apprentice at the British Aircraft Corporation at Brooklands (Weybridge), where he worked on production and final assembly lines of the Vickers Super VC10, and BAC One-Eleven , and manufacture of Concorde major sub-assemblies. He subsequently graduated from the BAC Design Training School to work in the airframe structures drawing office (including design of international future projects, such as the Panavia Tornado multi-role combat aircraft) before joining Flight International in 1973. Apart from years of reading aircraft magazines and books, his first direct contact with aviation media had come during the early 1970s when he was involved at Brooklands with the Weybridge Man-powered Aircraft Group, which designed and built the tenth aircraft to fly under purely human power. As an aviation journalist, he has worked at more than&nbsp; 50 of the major biennial&nbsp;global and regional international aerospace industry shows at Le Bourget, Farnborough, Singapore, and Dubai (having missed attending only one "Farnborough" since 1960), plus innumerable NBAA, HAI, (U.S.) AOPA, and EBACE Conventions and ERA Assemblies. His favourite aircraft is the Hawker Hunter, of which – as a schoolboy – he heard hundreds make their first flights from Dunsfold, where also on September 24, 2013, he saw the penultimate landing of the VC10 (happily involving an example of which he had witnessed the maiden takeoff in 1970) a day before the last example made the design's final flight (unless, of course....).

Senior correspondent

Ian Goold

Airbus and Bombardier have established “clean teams” to finalize arrangements under which the European manufacturer will take a 50.01-percent stake in <a href="https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/air-transport/2017-10-16/airbus-agrees-take-majority-stake-c-series">C Series Aircraft Limited Partnership (CSALP)</a>, which builds and sells the single-aisle jetliner. Existing partners Bombardier Aerospace and Québec provincial economic development agency Investissement Québec will hold reduced stakes of 31 percent and 19 percent, respectively.

 


Clean teams provide a mechanism by which companies wishing to work together—in this case, under a merger agreement—may share information in circumstances otherwise forbidden by anti-trust regulations. “Only clean teams may talk to each other,” according to Bombardier Aerostructures and Engineering Services (BAES) president Michael Ryan. They can speak with internal departments, which may respond, but they may not initiate communication.

 


Typically, to identify synergies, set interim targets, and prepare initial plans, clean teams may function legally separate from the protagonists’ operational management, but with privileged access to information, including competitively sensitive data.

 


Regulators such as the European Union or U.S. Federal Trade Commission might require both parties to operate independently while lawmakers consider possible competition issues, although integration planning may continue. Exchange of competitively sensitive data may be permitted for purposes of, for example, anti-trust analysis, due diligence, integration planning, synergy evaluation, or preparation of communications to regulators.

 


Bombardier called the use of clean teams “a fairly standard practice for this type of partnership discussion between companies who would be considered competitors. Unfortunately [we cannot provide] any more details on our particular team, or the process, scope, or mandate, as this is confidential,” it added. Airbus would say only that it expects completion of the transaction during the second half of 2018, as stated in October.

 


The move has come as Bombardier extends its supplier relationship with Airbus, which Ryan said dates back more than 30 years. On December 4, Bombardier announced it won a contract from Airbus to develop and manufacture a thrust-reverser&nbsp;for Pratt &amp; Whitney PW1100G geared turbofan engines that power the A320neo family.

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