Jetrader - Summer 2018 - 12

Q&A

FRED CROMER

President, Bombardier Commercial Aircraft
Jetrader recently spoke with Bombardier Commercial Aircraft President Fred Cromer on a
variety of topics, including Bombardier's much-publicized partnership with Airbus.

Jetrader: You've been involved in aviation for nearly 25 years. What is it about
the industry that's held your attention
for so long?
Fred Cromer: Well, the industry as a
whole is pretty dynamic and pretty exciting
actually. We're in the business of moving
people around, and from that standpoint
I get a lot of satisfaction from contributing to that. In the different areas I've
been involved in - whether it's operating
airlines or the leasing business and now
manufacturing - coming at it from different angles is always interesting, as well.
You get the full 360-degree perspective
of different players in the industry and
how it all comes together from each one's
point of view. For me, it has always been
exciting. There's no end to the challenges
and opportunities. It just keeps you on
your toes every day.
Jetrader: Last autumn, Bombardier
released its 20-year market forecast

for the 60- and 150-seat segments, and
the projections for Bombardier's role
in those markets were quite strong.
Can you elaborate on how you envision the company's further growth in
these segments?
FC: With the launch of the CSeries, we
moved into a different segment of the market in the 100- to 150-seat segment, and
what Bombardier set out to do years ago
was pretty challenging. The industry was
watching to see if the company could actually put it all together and make it happen.
Fast forward to where we are today, and
we've got an amazing aircraft. It's the best
aircraft in the 100- to 150-seat category,
and the industry is starting to recognize
what it can do both in terms of economics and passenger comfort, as well as in
terms of the low noise and what it means
for airports with high-density population
bases around the airport.
So any way you look at the CSeries program, Bombardier has achieved what it's
set out to achieve, and the industry is
starting to take note of that. We've been
building the momentum, and if you add
the more recent boost - or you could
even call it turbocharging - to the program by having Airbus come in, I think the
program's going to be phenomenal. It has
a great outlook.
And when we talk about roughly 6,000
aircraft in that segment, there are tremendous opportunities for this joint venture
with Bombardier and Airbus to capture
quite a bit of that opportunity and provide
real value to the airline community out
there in a size category that hasn't seen
those economics on a seat-mile basis relative to larger airplanes for quite some time.

12 The official publication of the International Society of Transport Aircraft Trading

For the 60- to 100-seat market segment, there are roughly 5,000 airplanes or
so - a little bit more in the CRJ category
versus turboprops - but the Bombardier
programs have really positioned themselves
well given where we are today and the large
installed customer bases that we have -
both on the CRJ and the Q400 to provide a
great platform as we look into the future.
The Q400, specifically, is a very capable
turboprop. It does something different than
the competition out there, and we are more
and more in front of customers that can
find the benefit from those enhancements
or differences, and that leads to real value
for them. When we're in front of customers, there's a real value proposition there
that we've been building because we've
been enhancing our marketing team over
the last several years since I joined the
company to really put the definition around
what that value proposition is. We've done
that specifically to be able to go into an
airline - to know exactly what's happening in their organization, their network,
their fleet plan - and demonstrate in the
very early stages of the campaign what our
aircraft can do.
That's starting to show in terms of more
orders for the Q400 and certainly follow-on
orders with existing customers but with
new customers as well. We're really making a lot of progress in building the backlog. The same is true on the CRJ. Some
people will call it a more mature program,
but we've got an incredibly large installed
customer base with several repeat orders.
What we're hearing from customers is that
the airplane is a workhorse; it does a great
job, it has very good economics and it's a
very competitive product.

Jetrader - Summer 2018

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