Swiss patient with further CSeries delays
• Bombardier Inc. appears to have found a patient CSeries launch partner in Swiss International Air Lines AG.
The f i rst customer to place a firm order for the aircraft, Swiss also ( somewhat reluctantly) agreed to be the first airline to fly it. Now, Swiss is shrugging off delivery delays that mean it will receive fewer aircraft than it expected this year, saying it has a painless fallback plan.
Bombardier revealed this month that it will deliver only seven CSeries jetliners this year, less than half its earlier forecast of 15, due to problems at engine supplier Pratt & Whitney.
Swiss, which currently has two CSeries in operation, was expecting to receive nine aircraft before the end of 2016. Now, all it can say for sure is that it will receive a third in October.
“All the rest, we don’t want t o make any commitments yet,” Peter Koch, Swiss’s fleet chief and program manager f or t he CSeries, said in an interview from Zurich.
But Koch isn’t frustrated by the delay. He said Bombardier has been in constant communication with Swiss and the airline, which is a subsidiary of the massive Deutsche Lufthansa AG, has access to plenty of other aircraft to help fill the gap.
“It was no surprise to us because Bombardier is playing with completely open cards, so as soon as Bombardier was aware of the issue they informed us,” Koch said.
“We had a plan based on the original amount of aircraft we ordered, but we also looked for some alternatives. After Bombardier approached us we looked at our network and were able basically to reallocate these flights to other aircraft within the Lufthansa Group.”
Swiss has ordered 30 CSeries in total. That includes 10 of the smaller CS100s, 15 of the l arger CS300s and five open slots that will be chosen once Swiss decides which version of the aircraft fits best in its network. Those will replace aging Avro RJ100s and Airbus A319s, which Swiss plans to phase out.
“Yes, it affected us; we had to re-plan the introduction,” Koch said. “On the other hand, we are continuing to phase out the older RJs as originally planned, so for me as fleet chief it’s good. … It has no impact on our network.”
Former Swiss CEO Harry Hohmeister, now chief officer of hub management at Lufthansa Group, told the Financial Post last year that “it was not an easy decision” to become the first airline to fly the CSeries, which was then in the midst of a two-year delay.
Swiss stepped up to the plate after t he original launch operator, Braathens Aviation AB, backed out in 2014. Hohmeister said the decision “was more driven by the request of Bombardier than by our own wishes.”
Koch, however, is quite pleased with the feedback he’s received from passengers, flight attendants and pilots about the two CS100s that are currently in service. He said the aircraft are proving to be highly reliable.