The first production Bombardier C Series will enter service with Swiss International Airlines on July 15, the airline confirmed Friday. Swiss expects to take delivery of the airplane—a CS100—at the end of June. It holds an order for 30 of the smaller of the two-member family of narrowbodies, which also includes the CS300
Schedules call for the first flight to take off from Zurich at 12:30 pm on a scheduled service to Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport.
Along with Paris, cities served by Swiss’s CS100 in July will include Manchester, Prague and Budapest, followed by Warsaw and Brussels at the end of August, and by Nice, Stuttgart, Hanover, Milan, Florence and Bucharest in September. Plans call for replacement of Avro RJ100s with the C Series on several more destinations as the new twinjets arrive, said Swiss. The airline expects to serve its Zurich-London City with the C Series starting in the first quarter of 2017.
Swiss reported that the arrival of the C Series will create 150 new jobs at the airline.
Bombardier announced on March 23 that the C Series completed a series of route-proving flights covering much of Europe in preparation for entry into service with Swiss. The program, conducted in Swiss’s route network, included more than 30 city-pair flights over a three-week period.
Results associated with airfield performance, landings, airport turnarounds and on-ground operations supported previous observations and confirmed that the C Series aircraft is meeting or exceeding original targets, according to Bombardier. The European route-proving program followed a similar exercise conducted last year across North America that included more than 35 cities.