Airbus and Bombardier will join forces on the next-generation C Series airliner
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
http://www.businessinsider.com/airbus-bombardier-c-series-bo...
The plane itself is great, but management incompetence and customer worries about the company's long-term prospects made it a hard sell. Then, when BBD did make a sale to Delta, Boeing's naked politicking and the current administration's unreasonable duty made the situation untenable. BBD is essentially handing over the keys to the kingdom here: Airbus gets control of the program for nothing (they only have to allow the C series to be manufactured at an existing plant in Mobile) and if the program is successful they have the right to buy out the entire partnership; if it's unsuccessful they can walk away. Plus, it's unclear to me whether it's a way to actually push the C-series or a way to start conversations around it and then upsell customers to one of Airbus' existing narrowbodies. Again, not a good situation for BBD.
Airplane manufacturing is a heavily political, heavily subsidized business, and since Canada is much smaller than the other players on the stage (US, EU, China, Russia) with a non-existent defence program it doesn't have the money or the weight to effectively compete.
Unless BBD is using an Airbus cockpit, this will turn out exactly as you think. Airbus will use the existence to upsell to "real" Airbus aircraft and this will be an afterthought. To do otherwise would jeopardize their value proposition and give Boeing an opening: "If you need a separate type rating anyways, why not consider a 737...?"
Well, the single-aisle twins (the A320 family) do. Though the A320neo does require a conversion course (taking c. four days).
The wide-bodies are a bit of a mess (the Airbus A300B2 and A300B4 share one type rating, the Airbus A300-600 and all A310 variants share one, A330 variants share one, and A350 variants share one).
> Unless BBD is using an Airbus cockpit, this will turn out exactly as you think. Airbus will use the existence to upsell to "real" Airbus aircraft and this will be an afterthought. To do otherwise would jeopardize their value proposition and give Boeing an opening: "If you need a separate type rating anyways, why not consider a 737...?"
But the A318 hasn't had any orders or deliveries since 2013, and isn't getting an neo variant. The A319neo has had 51 orders (v. the A320neo with 3673 and the A321neo with 1478). And the CS100/CS300 is competing with the A318 and A319. The common type rating of the A318 and A319 isn't seemingly something airlines care about anyway, instead choosing the larger Embraer E-Jets (mostly). Better to cannibalize yourself than have Embraer do it (and Boeing don't have any competing aircraft).