De-risking CSeries–but margin is gone

Note to Readers: In May, we attended the Pratt & Whitney media day, followed by the Airbus Innovation Days the same month and then the Boeing Pre-Farnborough Press Briefings over two days. This week we attended the Bombardier Farnborough Briefing. Boeing’s briefings are embargoed to July 5. We’re still digesting the PW event to tie information to news in the near future. Bombardier released its 20 year forecast, but we plan to tie that to information that was discussed at the embargoed Boeing briefings.

Bombardier made news with its statement that CSeries is on time. We dug a little deeper, however, and confirmed what had been hinted by Bombardier officials much earlier: that there is no margin left between now and the planned first flight by year-end.

At the same time, we received a run-down on some specific component areas that have been highlighted by analysts as risk areas. Here we go: