Bombardier is taking a hard look at offering an executive conversion of its recently announced C Series single-aisle twinjet to compete with the Embraer Lineage 1000.
“We have been approached by a number of customers who are interested in the C Series as a corporate jet and we are evaluating it,” said Benjamin Boehm, Bombardier’s vice president for commercial aircraft programs. Boehm said any final decision to develop such a variant would be “driven by our customers and our own internal design and development capacity.”
He declined to say when or if Bombardier would decide to offer the aircraft in a corporate configuration; however; the C Series is moving forward. Although the concept had been under investigation for more than a decade and the subject of several false starts, Bombardier did not formally announce the $46.7 million (average 2008 $) aircraft until July. Boehm said the stutter-step was caused by a “misalignment in the timing of the [past] programs and technologies” that did not achieve the results airline customers wanted. “Now we have an airplane with a significantly better engine,” he added.
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