- It is the most modern passenger jet that we have today
and its lightweight materials, cutting edge cockpit
and comfortable passenger seats is a true breath of fresh air in a world full of re-engined
and updated old airliners. So why would anyone claim
that the wonderful Airbus A220 could actually be a
developmental dead-end? Stay tuned. (playful chime) I have featured this aircraft on several videos on this channel and most recently I talked about it in a video about Spirit AeroSystems which is making key parts of the Airbus A220 including its wings. But Spirit is primarily a Boeing supplier, making fuselage parts
and other components for all Boeing airliners, including the entire fuselage
of the 737 that I fly. And that is having some
serious implications since Boeing now wants to buy
Spirit or at least part of it. Now I'll get back to that a
bit later but, for now, I want to explain the origin
tale behind the Airbus A220 because understanding that will give us a big clue about
why its future might be at risk. As I'm sure many of you guys already know, Airbus didn't come up
with this aircraft themselves. This beauty was instead designed by Bombardier in Canada
in order to fill a looming gap in the aircraft market. Around 20 years ago,
Bombardier observed that Boeing and Airbus had started
making narrow body aircraft that seemed to be getting bigger
and bigger as time went by. But the Boeing 737
and the Airbus A320 families did include some smaller variants but those designs
were typically optimized for the weight of the bigger and longer versions
of the same aircraft. This meant that
the smaller variants like the Boeing 737-600 and
700 and the Airbus A318 and 19 were a bit heavier
than they needed to be for the same number of
passengers that they could carry and that would obviously
make them slightly less efficient. Meanwhile, some of the
other even older types who were smaller were all
either going out of production or had already stopped
being produced. An example of that was the
Boeing 717, the last member of the MD-80 family who
would go out of production in 2006, while the Fokker 100 and the Avro RJ were still in service
but not being made anymore. The Bombardier engineers believed that if they took care
to fit their next aircraft with the latest engine technology and also made it as efficient as they possibly could,
then they could make it into something that would be more than just a short haul
or a regional aircraft. Obviously, the newer
engines in themselves would make the plane
a more attractive proposition for the airlines but the
lower fuel burn would also give the aircraft a longer range, allowing it to operate
to connect more medium-sized or small commercial
airports to each other. Now, I'm not going
to go into explaining the hub and spoke versus point-to-point operating
models again in this video, but you can see how the Bombardier design, which would later be
known as the CSeries, fitted the point-to-point
model quite well, and that was at a time when that model was already slowly
gaining in popularity. The fact that the CSeries
would be able to take on this role was severely misunderstood at the time, which maybe wasn't that surprising. Obviously, Bombardier was primarily
known for business jets, turboprops and regional
aircraft and many, including Boeing and Airbus initially, therefore dismissed the CSeries as just another somewhat
overgrown regional jet. Now, finding the right
engine took a while, but Bombardier eventually struck a deal with Pratt & Whitney for a version of the PW1000G Geared
Turbofan family called the PW1500G. With that, the CSeries
was officially launched at the Farnborough Airshow back in 2008, but from the outset, the programme
faced a lot of problems, including a fairly unrealistic budget. During their initial feasibility studies, Bombardier had predicted that the CSeries would cost around
US$2.1 billion to develop, and also that this cost would be shared with the governments who had
invested and supported the project. This obviously included Canada and Quebec's regional government, but also the UK government
since the plane's wings would be made in Belfast by the then-Bombardier-owned
Shorts Aircraft Company. But those development
costs ballooned very quickly after the programme
launched, and in 2009 the projection was that the true cost would instead hover around $3.5 billion. More state funding followed
to keep the programme aloft, and by the time the plane
was finally certified in 2015, its development costs had
grown to a staggering $5.4 billion. Later investments
on production infrastructure and more government help would raise the total programme
cost to $7 billion by 2020, but already in 2018, Airbus had stepped in and officially taken over the programme, renaming the CSeries
into the Airbus A220. Now when looking at this story, most people, myself included,
have previously focused mainly on the standoff between
Bombardier and Boeing, which eventually led to Airbus entering the picture and allowing them to snatch a controlling stake of the CSeries, basically for free. And today the CSeries is considered to be a quite successful aircraft, especially after some
early engine-related issues were resolved. And fortunately, the more recent
Pratt & Whitney engine issues haven't appeared to have
any effect on the A220, at least as far as we know so far. But even if the plane
is working just fine, their passengers and crews are happy, and new orders are coming in, Airbus is still making
these planes at a loss, so why is that? Well, it turns out
that there are a number of reasons behind that, including some quite
bad production inefficiencies. Bombardier didn't have much experience in building a large aircraft like this, which has made
its production unnecessarily slow and cumbersome compared to
especially Boeing and Airbus. And I'll give you one example. Boeing has the nose sections of all of their jets
made by Spirit AeroSystems before shipping them off
to their final assembly sites. But a lot of the wiring, hydraulic lines, flight deck equipment, insulations and other parts that Boeing gets from other suppliers
are already being fitted to those sections while they
are being worked on at Spirit. This pre-stuffing saves a lot of time when the fuselage, along with its wings and other components make it
to the final assembly line. And Airbus are
also doing something similar, but as Scott Hamilton
in Leeham News explains, they only started implementing this to the Airbus A220 program in 2021. But this wasn't the only problem. As a relatively small manufacturer,
Bombardier didn't have the kind of high standing to properly negotiate
favorable parts supplier contracts in the same way
as Airbus and Boeing could. This meant that a lot of the parts are more expensive than
they would have been if Airbus would have been able to negotiate
those contracts themselves. Now Airbus has ended
up needing quite some time to sort this out after
they took the airplane over. And obviously, the Airbus A220 is also still a North American design, with much of its supply chain stuck in North America and
that's also a little bit of a headache for Airbus. But even with all of those issues in mind, the fact still remains
that the Airbus A220 is a more efficient aircraft than any of the smaller Boeing
or Airbus models out there. The larger A220-300 is even stealing some sales
from the Airbus A320neo at the moment and Bombardier
designed that plane with an even bigger stretch
in mind and if that happens, it would align even more
with the Airbus A320neo and the Boeing 737 MAX 8. So if this aircraft is better
than what we have right now, then why would it be a dead end? Why wouldn't it eventually be developed to replace Airbus's current
generations of narrowbodies? Well as it turns out,
some of those developmental problems along with emerging
aircraft production methods and a lot of Airbus strategy could ultimately prove too important for this design to
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Now back to the video. To understand why the position of the A220 in the Airbus
lineup is a bit uncertain, we must first look at
how Airbus goes about making the A220 today and then compare that with the way they are
making the Airbus A320s. As I have explained in
many of my previous videos, Airbus are, at the moment, using different aero
structure manufacturing sites around Europe to make
different parts of their aircraft. Now there are some parts,
for example, the Airbus A350 that are made in the
United States but I believe that almost all of
the major structural parts for the Airbus A320
family are made in Europe. And by the way, if you think
that I'm wrong about that let me know in the comments below and send me a like
when you're down there. These kind of discussions, by the way, where I'm kind of doubting is very, very similar
to the kind of discussions that we have on my Patreon hangouts that we do a couple of times a month. I'd love to see you guys
there the next time so sign up. There should be a link
somewhere in the description below. Anyway all of these parts
are then shipped by sea, land or air to one of Airbus's
many final assembly lines or FALs where they
are then put together into a completed aircraft and this is typically quite efficient. But as I said earlier,
the Airbus A220 is different in this regard both because
of where it comes from but another big
difference is just its scale. The first A220s, when the program was still called CSeries were made in Bombardier's
Mirabel facility in Quebec and that's still where the main production of the A220 takes place. A second Finish Assembly Line
has opened in Alabama and when you put
these two sites together, well, then they have the capacity to produce around 14 A220s per month. But just because
that's the theoretical capacity, that doesn't mean that they're actually making aircraft at that rate. Airbus hopes to reach these
numbers in the next year or so and if they do, then maybe finally this program will become profitable. That maybe is because there
are also other profitability issues to work out and that brings me back to what I said in the beginning about Boeing and its desire to buy back Spirit AeroSystems. As it happens, Spirit is now the owner of that factory in Belfast, which is currently
making the A220 wing. Now obviously Airbus doesn't want
Boeing to own that factory and Boeing who is
trying to reintegrate Spirit as cheaply as possible doesn't really want an Airbus wing factory either. So that means that
Boeing and Airbus now need to try to figure out how
to split Spirit AeroSystems, something that I've already done
a video about previously. But of course it's not that simple. In that other video that I did,
I said that by buying that wing factory in Belfast, Airbus would effectively be
doing Boeing a favor by reducing the total
purchase price of Spirit. And as it turns out, that fact has now dawned on Airbus as well. And not only that,
the deal would likely be an even bigger favor to Boeing than it looks on the onset since the factory
is currently producing those Airbus A220 wings at a loss. So in May, we learned that
Airbus now doesn't simply want to buy that wing factory. They want to be compensated
for taking it over since it would require
additional investments of about $1 billion
to make it break even. And it will now be really interesting to see just how this pans
out over the next coming months. Now before this Spirit issue cropped up, Airbus' longer term target for the Airbus A220 production was to reach 20 or more aircraft
per month from the year 2026. And it's not clear how this new supplier situation
might affect that timeline. But either way, by 2026
Airbus wants to be producing around 75 Airbus A320
family aircraft per month across as many as 10
final assembly lines worldwide. That's one reason why
Airbus might still be reluctant to let the A220 cannibalize sales away from the Airbus A320neo family even though Airbus are making A320s and A321s as fast
that they possibly can and they will probably keep doing
so for many years to come. But when you look at those numbers, it's quite clear that
the entire Airbus supply and production infrastructure is revolving around the
Airbus A320neo family. It's just as easy as that. Now you might think
that the relatively low production of the Airbus A220 could
simply be a childhood problem which would be ironed out over time. After all the A220 program has a total of over 900 orders so far with a backlog of well over 500. But it's not just the
production infrastructure for the A320neo family
that could cause problems for the future of the A220. Another problem here is the
way that Airbus have evolved their entire aircraft
fleet to facilitate things for their customers in terms of training and even maintenance
between aircraft types. Normally, each airliner family comes with its own individual pilot type rating and any pilot who wants
to operate that family needs to go through that. There are some cases where different models share a type rating, thanks to similarities in
their flight decks and systems like the Boeing 777 and 787 and the Airbus A330
and the A340, for example. But the Airbus has
gone one step further and also designed their
cockpits and other systems between aircraft types to look,
feel and act very similar. The reason for that is very clever. You see if the cockpits are similar and the fly by wire technology makes the aircraft act
very similar in the air, well then an abbreviated
type rating is enough to switch a pilot between the Airbus A320 to the much bigger A330, for example. What this means, in
practice, is that instead of going through the around
two-month-long full type rating, an Airbus A320 pilot
can transfer to an A330 by following a much shorter process called a cross crew qualification which typically takes less than a week. Now Airbus went through
a lot of trouble to make sure this was the case across all aircraft they have
made since the Airbus A320. That includes the A330, A340
and even the A350 with the A380. This gives potentially huge benefits to airlines using several Airbus types and create a moat around their fleets. Because of this, some airlines have even introduced mixed
fleet flying procedures allowing pilots to fly both the A320 and the A380 families
within the same airline which is very, very cool. In practice though, not all airlines routinely swap their pilots
between types this way but the ability to do so
and the limited time required even for a simple
transition between types is a potential massive saving in training. So where does the Airbus
A220 fit into this process then? Well the short answer
is that it really doesn't. It is true that it uses
a fly by wire design and side stick like the
rest of the Airbus fleet but it is an entirely different
aircraft design and philosophy with its own entirely different systems and, of course, a
totally separate type rating. This obviously made sense when it was developed
since Bombardier had no reason to even try to make
its type rating the same as for the Airbus
fleet but this also means that the A220 now stands
a bit alone in the Airbus ecosystem. So with that in mind
let's think a little bit about what any further development of the A220 family might look like. As I said earlier, Bombardier designed the plane with a future
fuselage stretch in mind although that would require finding a bit more powerful engines. If we assume that finding
those engines isn't a problem, then Airbus could
launch the stretch model as soon as the A220 production
is finally profitable. That's because of those
commonality issues that I've just explained but also because of some
other longer term fleet plans that might actually
stop any further development and this is where things
start to get really interesting. We know by now
that both Airbus and Boeing would like to introduce
their next all-new airliners as sometime near the
middle of next decade. We know that they are planning for that because of emerging
engine technologies like the CFM RISE which neither
manufacturer can afford to ignore. But more importantly
that next aircraft design won't be just one aircraft model. Instead it will be the first member of a completely new aircraft family whose systems should be modern enough to make it compatible with existing or future aircraft families. So then if that new aircraft will have to be backward compatible, what Airbus design do you think
the company will draw from? What supply chain
will be used to make it and where do you think
it would be assembled? I think you can probably see
why despite its modern design, the Airbus A220 might not
be the obvious choice here especially if you consider the
sheer number of Airbus A320, A330, A340 and
A380 aircraft flying today and how many pilots
that would be affected. Now you might say,
"Well, okay Petter but that still doesn't
explain why Airbus wouldn't even want to do the stretch A220 especially if the engineering
and design work for that one has already been done." Well, here we have another factor that might spoil the party for aircraft and airlines like Air France, Breeze and probably JetBlue who really would like to buy it. And that's the future cost and speed of development of newer aircraft. You see, on average, developing
an all-new airliner takes around seven years at the moment and that's if everything goes well
which is a very big if. But for years now both Boeing
and Airbus have been working on plans to try and
reduce this average time to a much shorter period. Boeing tried this with the development of the 787 and failed badly but the theory is that as
digital design tools gets better, implementing and certifying
new designs in the future should become much
simpler and faster. At the same time,
manufacturers are also trying to introduce more cost-efficient ways to produce lightweight
composited structures using techniques like the out-of-autoclave
manufacturing, for example. And when that technology
becomes fully viable, it will make those kinds of parts cheaper and quicker to produce
and allow production to scale up and down
with demand more easily. Obviously, this is
a really complicated issue which I'm severely oversimplifying here but if you want to
read more details about it, you should check out
Björn Fehrm's aircraft development series over on Leeham News. It's absolutely fantastic. So if we put all of these
developments together, this means that if Airbus and
Boeing manages to pull this off, then they will be able to introduce all new super efficient,
cheaper-to-produce aircraft much faster than they can right now and they will also cost
less to bring to market and therefore be quicker to break even. So if that happens, will even
a stretched A220 be worth it for Airbus or should
it just go straight for a completely new design aligned with the rest
of their legacy lineup? Again, there are a lot of ifs here and Bjorn has also listed quite
a few more over in his series but the one thing that we do know is that both Boeing
and Airbus are busy working on new aircraft designs that will suit the CFM RISE engine
and they should be ready to enter service in a
little over a decade from now. So fast development or not,
something is definitely coming and whether or not Airbus
will want or need a stretched A220 well, it depends on how quickly it will actually become profitable and on whether or not Boeing,
in the meantime, will do something that
will force Airbus's hand. If Boeing manages to
turn around its fortunes and launch an all new aircraft quicker then Airbus might have to react. And in that scenario,
it's far from certain that a stretched Airbus A220
will be the right answer. What do you think though? What does the future hold for the A220? Let me know in the
comments here below or join my Patreon crew if you
want to discuss this directly with me in our next hangout. You can also support my work by sending a Super Thanks buy some merch or
by checking out my sponsor. Everything really helps. Have an absolutely fantastic
day wherever you are and I'll see you next time. Bye bye. Airbus would effectively be
doing Boeing a favor by reducing the total puh-shays p-p-p (blows raspberry) ^purchase price of Spirit, right?
