The Long and Short of Bombardier’s CSeries

choi

Ian Austen, Longer Odds for a Jet. Bombardier envisions its CSeries airplane as a disruptive challenger to Boeing and Airbus. But delays have stolen some of its thunder. New York Timers, Jan 9, 2015.
www.nytimes.com/2015/01/09/busin ... ng-longer-odds.html

Quote:

"If all had gone according to plan, Bombardier’s direct challenge to the Boeing 737, the world’s best-selling commercial plane, would be approaching its second year in service. * * * Now, many analysts expect that the first passengers won’t step aboard a CSeries jet until 2016, although the company is standing by its forecast of late 2015.

"in May at an airport outside this city, one of the plane’s innovative new engines exploded during a ground test, damaging a prototype. * * * The linchpin for the CSeries was a new concept for engines developed by Pratt & Whitney, known as a high bypass geared turbofan. * * * The engine’s failure in May, he added, eventually proved to be caused by a relatively minor fault in an oiling system rather than a fundamental design flaw.

My comment:
(a) This is a rare gem. A lot has been said about China’s efforts on regional jets. But few about other similar projects from Japan to Russia to Brazil. This is the first comprehensive report I know of, about Bombardier.
(b) The first sentence of quotation 1 suggests The CSeries should have started delivery in 2014.

(c) "Pierre Beaudoin, Bombardier’s president and chief executive, who in 1985 joined the company founded by his [maternal] grandfather. * * * Back home in Quebec, Bombardier is still celebrated as the company that ended rural isolation early in the 20th century when winter cut off many towns outside the reach of trains. The solutions from Joseph-Armand Bombardier, Mr Beaudoin’s grandfather, was a tracked, scarab-shape snowmobile. After World War II as Quebec introduced widespread road clearing, Bombardier survived and prospered by selling the Ski-Doo snowmobile as a winter toy for adults. * * * Laurent Beaudoin, the founder’s son-in-law, father of Pierre and the company’s chairman, [later] reopened a shuttered Ski-Doo factory to build the cars * * * : the city’s [Quebec’s] new subway."
(i) Scarabaeus sacer
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarabaeus_sacer
(a species of dung beetle; "This behaviour [rolling a dung ball across the ground] inspired the Ancient Egyptians to compare Scarabaeus sacer to Khepri [moving the sun across the sky], their Sun god. They accordingly held the species to be sacred"/ beetle's head " has a distinctive array of six projections [photo]")
(ii) Of course snowmobiles, even those of Bombardier, looks alike nowadays. But it was not the case when snowmobiles were just created.
(A) Bombardier Recreational Products
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_Recreational_Products
(section 1 Snowmobiles)

View only the three photos, whose caption is "1949 Bombardier B12."
(B) snowmobile
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowmobile
(section 2 Multi-passenger snowmobiles)

In other words, what the grandfather invented was not a personal snowmobile.
(C) Ski-Doo
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ski-Doo
(The first Ski-Doo was launched in 1959. It was a new invention of Joseph-Armand Bombardier. The original name was Ski-Dog, but a typographical error in a Bombardier brochure changed the name Ski-Dog to Ski-Doo”)

(d) "Laurent Beaudoin’s biggest gamble came in 1986. Bombardier was the only bidder for Canadair, an ailing aircraft manufacturer that the Canadian government put up for sale. * * * Before its sale to Bombardier, Canadair was exploring how to turn its executive jets into regional jets, which could replace propeller planes on routes feeding passengers from small centers into airline hubs."
(i) regional airliner
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_airliner
(a small airliner that is designed to fly up to 100 passengers on short-haul flights, usually feeding larger carriers' hubs from small markets)
(ii) In the quotation, the “regional jets” by definition used/uses jet engine--specifically turbofan. That is what CSeries is about, engine-wise.

(e) "Bombardier committed to the CSeries program in 2007 [following a study it had commissioned] * * * Those hubs give [mainline, as opposed to regional] airlines greater economies of scale. But Bombardier calculated that a new efficient airliner slightly smaller than a 737 or an A320 — one with 100 to 150 seats — could carry passengers directly between smaller airports at the same cost per seat as the larger planes. '[mainline] Airlines are forcing you through hubs because they’re being forced to have big airplanes,' Mr Beaudoin said."

The key words here are "directly between"--bypassing hubs.
(f) Regarding quotation 2. CSeries is not the only airplanes that adopt the engine. See Pratt & Whitney PW1000G
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_%26_Whitney_PW1000G
("currently selected as the exclusive engine for the Bombardier CSeries, Mitsubishi Regional Jet (MRJ), Embraer's second generation E-Jets, and as an option on the Irkut MC-21 and Airbus A320neo. The project was previously known as the Geared Turbofan (GTF)")