The fallout with Airbus continues.
Airbus Executives call CSeries "an orphan":
Executives at Airbus Group SE, the world’s biggest plane maker, dismissed the Bombardier C Series jet as an “orphan” and said that talks between the two companies aimed at propping up the struggling Canadian aircraft are dead.
Speaking at Airbus’s annual press conference Tuesday in Paris, John Leahy, Airbus’s chief salesman and commercial officer, called the C Series “a nice little plane” that was probably forever doomed to be a poor seller. ...
Tom Williams, Airbus’s chief operating officer, said Bombardier will have to invest heavily in the C Series over the long haul if it hopes to make it a success. “If you take a 10- or 15-year view, if you’re willing to invest in customer financing, training, spares, residual-value guarantees et cetera, that needs a lot of deep pockets and a long-term commitment,” he said.
The question is... why are they making these public statements now? The Airbus-Bombardier talks collapsed months ago.
Either Airbus is very confident that the CSeries is going nowhere, or just the opposite -- an aggressive Bombardier sales campaign targeting Airbus customers might be behind these comments?
To be sure, approaching Airbus was a strategic blunder...