- The jet’s sterling record won’t help Bombardier as the Quebec manufacturer divested its aircraft programs to focus on building private jets for businesses and the ultrawealthy.
The Bombardier CRJ-700 passenger plane involved in the tragic midair crash with a U.S. Army helicopter in the midnight skies of Washington, D.C., is a workhorse of the regional jet market with a sterling safety record.
In the final hours of Wednesday, the aircraft was on its approach to D.C.’s Ronald Reagan National Airport carrying 64 passengers and crew when it collided with a Sikorsky Black Hawk on a training flight.
The first fatal U.S. Aviation accident since 2009 occurred in one of the most heavily controlled airspaces on American soil. Reagan National is a Class B airport, reserved for the busiest destinations like New York’s JFK. This means airborne objects as far as 30 nautical miles away and operating up to a ceiling of 10,000 feet are subject to air traffic rules from the tower.
But Bombardier is no Boeing. The Canadair Regional Jet 700 series, which entered service over 25 years ago, has not been subject to midair malfunctions or defects of any kind, and no fatalities are associated with this class of aircraft.
According to a database run by the nonprofit Flight Safety Foundation, there was only one occurrence of a mechanical defect, in July 2017 during a landing maneuver in Denver that damaged the plane.
All other incidents have been largely minimal and stemmed from human negligence.
“Today, the CRJ Series family of aircraft is the world’s most successful regional aircraft program,” Bombardier says.
Bombardier axes most aircraft programs after C-Series development too costly
Yet the Montreal-based aerospace firm likely won’t have to face any uncomfortable questions when it reports results next Thursday.
That’s because the company is not even in the business of manufacturing aircraft for carriers like American’s wholly owned subsidiary PSA Airlines, which operated the American Eagle Flight 5342 out of Wichita.
Owing to financial difficulties in the 2010s stemming from the costly development of its C-Series narrow-body line, Bombardier management streamlined its portfolio to focus solely on exclusive private jets for businesses and the ultrawealthy.
All the other civilian aircraft projects—including the C-Series now marketed as the Airbus A220—were divested one by one. The Canadair Regional Jet line, meanwhile, was sold for $750 million in equity and debt to Japanese competitor Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) just months before the COVID pandemic broke out.
Under the deal, Bombardier was only obligated to finish construction of the remaining aircraft on backlog, with the final CRJ-700 plane delivered to customers four years ago.
Despite MHI’s investment largely targeted at accessing a new geographic market, the new owner eventually abandoned the regional jet business entirely, shutting down its planned CRJ successor, the MHI SpaceJet. Now demand for passenger planes capable of seating 60 to 100 people is largely served by Brazil’s Embraer Group.
Bombardier currently concentrates on its two main lines of private jets, Challenger and Global, which were developed following its 1990 acquisition of Learjet. These are led by the upcoming flagship Global 8000, which costs an estimated $80 million–plus and can seat as many as 18 occupants while traveling nearly at the speed of sound.