Having marked its first sales success as a standalone company on October 19 with the order of a fifth Dash 8-400 for Air Tanzania, de Havilland Aircraft of Canada (DHC) has begun a one-year review to decide if it should add two new services businesses to provide further support both for in-service and new-production aircraft.

With the start of the company’s new financial year on November 1, DHC has started to review if it makes commercial sense for it to add a used-parts sales and exchange arm to support the Dash 8-400 program and also to establish a Dash 8-400 maintenance-services business, said Todd Young, DHC’s chief operating officer.

DHC has a large existing product support team—which it calls its Customer Service and Support Organization—and already sells and trades new Dash 8-400 rotable parts, Young told AIN. “We’re the top rotables provider relative to the number of aircraft in the program,” he said. However, “We do recognize that our market dynamics are changing slightly, so we’re looking at the possibility of getting into the used [Dash 8-400] parts business—selling and exchanging parts, not just rotables. We’re also looking at the possibility of partnering [with an existing maintenance provider] or establishing a maintenance services business,” he said.

“We’re focused on our customers coming to us as the first choice” for any support needs they might have, added Young. "[So] we’re going to explore those business segments to see what sense they make to us,” as regards benefiting DHC’s Dash 8-400 sales and production program and the company’s overall commercial standing.

Young said DHC is planning to continue its review of whether to enter the potential new business areas “through our financial year 2020,” which ends on October 31 next year. The company will then decide whether to add those service offerings “beyond a year from now.”

Additionally, Young confirmed that while DHC in its new form hasn’t yet become involved in trading used Dash 8-400s or other legacy de Havilland Canada aircraft, the company would consider doing so if circumstances warranted—and particularly if a new Dash 8-400 order hinged upon such a deal. “We’d probably prefer not to have to buy used airplanes, but if we needed to, or do a trade-in, we’d review the possibility. We are open to those discussions,” he said.

In that regard, DHC views the increasingly healthy lessor base for the Dash 8-400 as a positive development. “The good news is that we have a much stronger lessor base than we did seven to 10 years ago—a number of lessors have Dash 8-400s in their portfolios,” said Young. That is important to DHC because, if it were to become involved in trading used Dash 8-400s and/or other legacy DHC aircraft, “we would want to see if we could bring in a lessor” as a third-party trading partner. That way, DHC could create “a win-win-win situation” for itself, the aircraft operator wanting to order new Dash 8-400s and the lessor taking the used aircraft.

DHC is well aware of “the whole aspect of the used market, and we want our fleet to continue flying,” said Young. “We will be and have been working with our operators to ensure we do everything we can to keep them flying.” That includes the programs DHC developed under Bombardier ownership five years ago, which allowed the service lives of the Dash 8-100 and Dash 8-300 to be extended from 80,000 to 120,000 cycles.

DHC created the programs by issuing a service bulletin and designing a revised maintenance program for each type. Long-time DHC customer Widerøe in Norway was the launch customer for the Dash 8-100 Extended Service Program and Canadian operator Jazz was the launch customer for the Dash 8-300 program. “We do have the ability to do a service bulletin for the Dash 8-200, but we will do it at the right time,” said Young. “The aircraft is still relatively young.”

A Potential New Home?

DHC potentially might have to leave its traditional base at Downsview Airport in Toronto in either 2012 or 2023 at the end of its sub-lease of the airport from Bombardier, which sold the airport and its land to Canada’s Public Sector Pension Investment Board in May 2018 for C$816 million ($622 million). Bombardier then leased Downsview Airport back for three years but negotiated two optional one-year lease extensions that could extend its lease to 2023.

Asked what DHC would do if it had to leave Downsview, Young replied, “We’ve looked at it in great detail. We did that in the summer of 2018, right after Bombardier announced it had sold the land. We’re quite confident that, if we had to move, there are options available to us.” Revealing that DHC decided to restrict its search for other suitable airport homes to just the province of Ontario, he said, “there are options at a number of other airports.” Young confirmed all of those options would offer DHC the runway length, the factory space, the areas required for pre-flight activities, and the space for or access to an aircraft paint-shop it would require.

He also confirmed that under its new owner, DHC has returned to calling the Dash 8-400 precisely that—“there’s no ‘Q’, and the ‘NextGen’ has gone as well,” said Young. Bombardier’s marketing efforts for the aircraft saw it calling the aircraft “the Q400” publicly and “the Dash 8-402NG” in its customer documentation.

“There was incredible excitement in Canada about the return of the [DHC] name, so the owners decided to go back to the original name” for the aircraft that is now DHC’s raison d'être, he said. “The aircraft is still the same and we decided it was important to recognize the beginnings of the program.”