Bombardier Confident It Will Hit C Series Delivery Target for 2017
Despite going more than two months without delivering an airplane, company expects to ship between 30 and 35 airplanes this year
Swiss International Airlines' Bombardier CS100s can fly as far as 2,228 nautical miles with a full passenger load from London City. (Photo: Bombardier)

Swiss International Airlines’ acceptance of its sixth Bombardier CS100 on March 8 marked the first C Series delivery of the year, highlighting interruptions caused by persistent supply chain bottlenecks. Still, the Canadian airframe maker expects to deliver between 30 and 35 airplanes this year, as Pratt & Whitney, for one, continues to assure customers that it has addressed fan blade production problems and will soon solve technical “issues” related to parts such as the engines’ combustor.  

Speaking at the recent International Society of Transport Aircraft Traders conference in San Diego, Pratt & Whitney vice president of sales and marketing for commercial engines Rick Deurloo detailed some of the problems the PW1000G family has encountered, forcing Airbus and, perhaps to a lesser degree, Bombardier, to delay deliveries of their respective new narrowbodies.

“We recognize that we are causing some challenges right now,” Deurloo conceded. “There’s an industrial piece and there’s a technical piece.” The industrial “piece” involves a shortage of hybrid metallic fan blades due to manufacturing complexities. That appears to be the main culprit behind the C Series delays. Deurloo said that Pratt will triple production of the fan blades after opening two new assembly facilities this year, allowing it to deliver between 350 and 400 engines by year-end.

Deurloo characterized the so-called challenges with fan blades already in service as “early manufacturing [problems].”

“Today, we feel that all the processes we have in place [are] taking us the right way,” he said, but added; “That being said, we know we still have some challenges.”

Separate durability deficiencies, particularly in the A320neos operating in India, involve combustor liners. Having made some modifications to date, he said, "We have further upgrades going in this year; so we know this issue, [and] we’ve modeled it. We’ll get this behind us.”

Another problem centers on the Number 3 oil seals in the A320neos’ PW1100G geared turbofan (GTF) engines. “Basically, it’s causing a lot of unplanned removals by our customers,” Deurloo achnowledged. As a result, engines delivered to Airbus starting this month use a new hardware configuration. Second, Airbus began flight testing this month a separate modification involving unnamed software and hardware components, Deurloo reported. Pratt expects the resulting retrofit to reach customers starting in April. “The good thing about this is it’s retrofittable,” he noted. “We’ll put this retrofit on the [final assembly line] at Airbus as well.”

Speaking with AIN at ISTAT, Bombardier vice president of commercial operations Ross Mitchell acknowledged that engine supply problems have affected the C Series, but he insisted that deliveries will accelerate as the year wears on. He also noted that some of the technical problems Airbus has encountered with its version of the GTF don’t apply to the Bombardier product. “We haven’t been affected by the [oil seal] issues,” he said. “We’ve been saying for a number of years there’s a difference between building the airplane around the engine and simply integrating the engine into the airplane after it has been designed, which is what the other guys are doing. That makes a difference in reliability...Both systems are designed in parallel, and I think the evidence is that our airplane is performing flawlessly. There are supply chain issues...but if supply chain issues are the worst thing you face as you enter service that’s a pretty good result.”