Bombardier Flies New Continental; First Two Years Production Sold Out

Bombardier Business Aircraft is targeting 30% of a super-midsize business jet market it pegs at 1,279 aircraft over the next ten years with its new super-midsize Continental.

The $14.675 million aircraft made its maiden flight on August 14 at Bombardier's facility in Wichita, with Bombardier test pilots Jim Dwyer (left seat) and Ed Grabman at the controls.

The number one aircraft, s/n 20001, has since been painted, and aircraft No. 2 will join the test program any day now.

The company claims 115 orders for the new eight-passenger airplane, 25 of them from Bombardier's Flexjet fractional ownership program. "Green" deliveries of the 3,000-nmi, Mach 0.80 Continental are to commence late next year following third-quarter 2002 certification. Service entry is planned for June 2003. "The first two years are booked," Bombardier product development VP Charbel Bachaalani told Show News.

The Continental will outperform the Citation X, Falcon 50EX and Gulfstream 200 (the former Galaxy) in most aspects of performance and interior space, yet will be considerably cheaper, Bombardier says.

"The price point was a key determinant," says Continental product manager Marc Galin. Bombardier assessed the market via hundreds of detailed questionnaires and interviews with the CEOs of aircraft-buying companies.

Bombardier is predicting a direct operating cost of about $940 per hour for the Continental, which it says is more in line with midsize aircraft than super-mids. "We looked at the Lear 45 and the Challenger and we got the best out of both," Bachaalani says in reference to Bombardier's newest Learjet and its larger workhorse, which was relaunched as the Challenger 604 in 1995.

The Continental interior is being developed by DeCrane, which will supply componentry for Bombardier completions to be done in Tucson. Bombardier intends to certify the Continental interior concurrently with the flight test regime. To further save time, five aircraft will be committed to the certification program instead of the usual four, Bachaalani says. Airframe 20002 will fly this month, and s/ns 20003 and 20004 are already assembled.

The aircraft is to be JAA-certified too, and Bombardier has demanded that its key suppliers follow the same timesaving certification regime.

Principal among them is Honeywell, which is furnishing the Continental's 6,500-pounds-thrust AS907 engines, which share a common core with the engines powering the BAE Avro RJX regional airliner.

Honeywell is in fact supplying the Continental's entire "propulsion system," says Bachaalani, as the company is responsible for the new jet's GKN Westland nacelles and Hurel-Dubois thrust-reversers, as well as the engine itself. Honeywell is also supplying the Continental's APU.

The AS907 system, which is designed for ease of maintenance (just six hours for removal from the aircraft, for example) will meet Stage 4 noise compliance rules, notes Bombardier's Galin. The engine is already almost halfway through certification flight tests on Honeywell's Boeing 720 testbed.

The new aircraft will be fitted with the Rockwell Collins Pro Line 21 avionics suite, and all avionics options, including redundant DME, satcom, weather radar with turbulence detector, and 3-D moving maps, will be certified in line with the basic aircraft's timetable. "We give the customer what he wants up front," Bachaalani says.

Bombardier will build the Continental's cockpit and forward fuselage in Montreal, while its Shorts subsidiary will build the mid-fuselage in Belfast.

Other major Continental suppliers include Mitsubishi Heavy Industries of Nagoya, Japan for wings, Taiwan's AIDC for aft fuselage and tail components, Messier-Dowty for landing gear, Goodrich for wheels and brakes, and NLX for a flight training simulator-also to be certified along with the aircraft itself.

Wichita assembly will eventually ramp up to production of 60 Continentals per year.

-Rich Piellisch