Plane makers find common ground
Agreement with Chinese to help in future deals
The commonality between Bombardier Inc.’s Cseries and China’s Commercial Aircraft Corp.’s C919 should help sales in China’s particular aircraft procurement process, Benjamin Boehm said in a telephone interview Thursday.
The two companies said Wednesday they had whittled down their broad general agreement of last year into four specific areas: a common cockpit ergonomy, developing joint standards for aluminum-lithium used in their respective aircraft; common technical and training publications; and electrical systems.
The cockpit is the most critical, said Boehm, head of Bombardier China, as “pilot training has probably the largest impact on the cost of an airline to switch between one model and another.”
“The starting point now is the human interface; when pilots walk into that cockpit, they start to feel at home. They feel and see the location of switches and overall sizing, shape and look and feel – all those being as identical as possible between the two planes.”
But the two cockpits won’t have the same avionics systems – the electronic and display system that process the pilot’s requests and control the plane’s various func- tions. Both picked their suppliers long ago, before they paired up last year to define areas of common development.
The commonality aspect is key in airline decisions to buy planes, providing a major cost advantage. The cockpit layout and positions of buttons and switches is mostly an ergonomic issue, but Boehm said that it will also cut down on pilot training costs.
“The goal is to reduce the amount of training time, reduce the amount of change impact that a pilot on an airline that has, say, a C919, would see if he also trained on a Cseries.”
One of Bombardier’s goals with the joint program is to pierce the Chinese market for its Cseries, which has yet to record a sale there.
Leasing companies in general have expressed interest, said Boehm.
“And procurement of aircraft in China is done more centrally, not so much independently by individual airlines, so there’s some interest there – (the framework agreement) is attracting some attention.”
The Cseries and C919 will have different engines.
But Boehm said that “engine commonality is not as big a problem as most people make it out to be. Engine differences between airplanes (at one airline), yes it can add a big factor, but at the same time, when you have different sizes of airplanes, you have different (model sizes of engines) anyway. The GTF that we have wouldn’t be the same one they could use anyway.”
The Cseries ends at 150 seats, the starting point for the C919.