Though it has not yet seen order cancellations, Embraer is receiving requests from some customers to defer delivery of aircraft as its businesses feel the effects of the global spread of the Covid-19 virus.

“We had some inbound requests for relatively short-term deferments, but nothing that would push aircraft [delivery] out of the calendar year. We are talking about a delay of a few weeks or a month,” Embraer Commercial Aircraft president and CEO John Slattery told AIN on the sidelines of the aviation summit organized by Brussels-based airline trade association Airlines for Europe (A4E). “Of course, we are accommodating these requests where possible,” he added, while pointing out that the Brazilian airframer’s airline customers have reacted to the coronavirus crisis with “immediate effectiveness,” reducing schedules and cutting unnecessary expenditure until the situation become clearer. “Scheduled operations were reduced by 20 to 90 percent depending on the part of the world they are based in,” he said. “Our focus now is trying to support our airlines from an operational perspective as they deal with this.” Support includes facilitating maintenance for grounded fleets. “We are trying to make more resources available,” he added.

Asked whether the Covid-19 epidemic had rendered the sales environment more difficult, Slattery asserted the Embraer perspective might differ from that of Boeing or Airbus due to the lengthy in-depth investigation of its proposed joint venture with the U.S. aerospace giant by the European Commission. “The environment for selling aircraft now is getting increasingly complicated because airlines want to have visibility on Embraer gaining its final antitrust approval and clarity on the joint venture,” he said. “They want to know the profile of the company.”

Brussels’s investigation of Boeing’s proposed acquisition of 80 percent of Embraer’s commercial aircraft division has now entered its eight month. It paused its review twice, then resumed the probe on February 21, setting June 23 as a decision deadline. By the end of last year, the commission’s competition division had requested more than 1.5 million pages of documentation and data on 1,200 sales campaigns over the past 20 years. Boeing and Embraer received additional requests for information since then, the last one as recent as late last week, sources familiar with the case told AIN.

Some insiders believe the commission likely will issue a so-called state of objections, which would detail the potential concerns the EU antitrust regulators still harbor and allow the OEMs to submit a targeted and detailed response. However, Boeing and Embraer remain hopeful of a positive outcome. “We continue to cooperate with the European Commission as it assesses our transaction and look forward to a positive resolution,” they said in an emailed statement.

“I have optimism and confidence in equal measure that the correct decision [will be taken], which will be a convergence with all of the other antitrust approvals that have been obtained unconditionally around the world,” Slattery told AIN. The joint venture deal needs approval from competition authorities in nine countries. Eight jurisdictions—the U.S., China, Japan, South Africa, Kenya, Colombia, Montenegro, and Brazil—have endorsed the tie-up without demanding changes to the deal.

Lufthansa Group CEO Carsten Spohr this week joined the heads of other airlines and leasing companies in publicly supporting the Boeing-Embraer joint venture. Speaking at the A4E conference, Spohr said he would “rather have two healthy competitors who compete on every range and scale of aircraft with each other than to have a monopoly sometime, somewhere.” He added that Lufthansa had pushed Bombardier to develop the C Series to create “a third force,” but the airline changed its view after realizing the Canadian company was too small to compete effectively. He called the airplane now known as the Airbus A220 a “great aircraft,” but he also asserted it only became economically feasible since Airbus assumed control of the program. “We were supportive of the C Series integration into Airbus and we are supportive of the Embraer integration into Boeing,” he concluded.