Will Bombardier break the Boeing and Airbus commercial aircraft duopoly with its C Series?

I’ve actually worked on the CSeries. Apologies if I don’t / can’t go into specifics.

The thing to remember is that Airbus and Boeing pop single-aisle aircraft like buns in the oven. They aren’t sitting idly by while Bombardier or Embraer or whomever is thinks they can take over the market. And they didn’t get there by accident either, Boeing and Airbus make great airplanes.

Where Bombardier intends to go with the CSeries isn’t so much as break the duopoly as much as sneak in at the low end of the single-aisle market. The aircraft is intended as a replacement for the out-of-production McDonnell Douglas DC-9, British Aerospace 146, Fokker 70, Fokker 100 and other aircraft in the 100 passenger range and which will need to be replaced and for which there isn’t a good replacement on the market. They might also pick off some Airbus A318 (which isn’t that efficient anyway) sales along the way and isn’t selling that well (and may well become out of production this year).

But they’re not really going head-to-head with neither Boeing nor Airbus. The CS300 (the bigger version of the CSeries) is only as big as the smallest of Boeing’s and Airbus’ single-aisle offering (the 737 MAX 7 and the A318, respectively), and their sales in that area aren’t exactly stellar. The 737 MAX 7 has 60 orders, out of a backlog nearing 3,000. The A318, as said earlier, has 80 orders and 0 backlog, out of nearly 8,000 orders.

So no, Bombardier isn’t exactly going to break the duopoly, they’re going after a market that neither Boeing nor Airbus seem to care much about, it’s a zeropoly. Bombardier is doing a bit of a gamble that it will pay off.

As for the other companies on your list:

• Sukhoi: their biggest problem is the domestic politics in its home country. Pretty much only being sold to Russian carriers. Also Sukhoi doesn’t make any aircraft that compete with Boeing or Airbus products. Russian aircraft are not quite on par with Western aircraft, but they are well-engineered and I would fly Russian long before I would fly Chinese aircraft. Only when they make friends with the West will they be able to compete, as currently no Western equipment supplier would touch them; solve that problem and they could pose a real threat to Airbus and Boeing, moreso than Bombardier.
• Embraer: do not currently produce aircraft that compete with Boeing or Airbus. And if they did, they wouldn’t last long, the engineering is lower than Sukhoi. I have flown E-Jets many times and it feels like being inside an old 727.
• Comac: their aim is openly stated, they intend to break the Boeing / Airbus duopoly with the Comac C919, C929 and C939. I wish them well, but my personal feelings are, if the C919 ever makes it to market I will make sure never to fly on it. I will fly Embraer or Sukhoi long before I fly on a Comac. And for now, their sales have come exclusively from Chinese airlines. Don’t bet on them breaking any duopoly anytime soon.

Up until a year ago, I worked on the CSeries, and so it is heartbreaking to assess that Bombardier is not going to break into the market with the Cseries in the short or medium term.

She’s a damn fine plane. She’s almost eerily quiet, and her performance and fuel efficiency numbers truly are better than what Boeing and Airbus have in this size class.

The problem is that no one seems to want planes in this size class anymore. It’s like how the Toyota Camry seems to get a little bigger every year. The airlines seem to have decided they want planes in the class just above the CSeries, which was not believed to be the case when the CSeries was first launched. Also, the plane’s other major advantage, it’s fuel efficiency, seems to have been negated in the medium term by persistently low oil prices.

Bombardier could have remedied this by quickly making a stretch model (which they considered, which would have been the CS500, with 160 seat capacity), alas the company has run out of money to contemplate this. It looks like they will need Quebec’s investment to even make it through the current CS100/300 production run.

Regarding the other jet makers, interestingly I once asked a very experienced, senior colleague of mine, what he thought about the Chinese challenge from COMAC. He replied that he was not as much worried about the Chinese, or the Brazilians, or the Russians, as he was the Japanese. He said that once they move up from regional jets such as the Mitsubishi MRJ and gain more confidence, Boeing was really going to go have something to worry about. My colleague may have had his own biases but anyway thought it was an interesting data point worth sharing.