-KATHMANDU
Airbus A220 has begun a demonstration tour of its A220 regional jet across Asia.
The tour commenced on November 5, 2018, when an airBaltic A220-300 touched down at the Zhuhai Airshow in China.
The aircraft, formerly known as the CSeries, is scheduled to be in Chengdu on November 9, Koh Samui in Thailand on November 10, Kathmandu in Nepal on November 11 and Istanbul in Turkey on November 12 to perform demonstration flights for its probable customers and allow the engineers, ground crew and aviation expertise to know about the aircraft.
It will then return to airBaltic’s base in Riga, Latvia on November 14.
On October 2017, Airbus struck an agreement with Bombardier to become a partner and 50.01 percent majority shareholder in the CSeries program, with Bombardier and the Quebec governments investment arm, Investissement Québec, owning approximately 34 percent and 16 percent, respectively.
The deal was finalized on July 1, 2018, and later in the month Airbus officially rebranded the CSeries as the A220 at an event held at its Toulouse headquarters featuring invited guests, executives from both companies and invited media.
The A220 family comprises two models, the A220-100 (100-135 seats) and A220-300 (130-160 seats), formerly Bombardier’s CS100 and CS300.
The A220-100 has a range of 2,950nm when configured with 116 passengers, while Airbus lists the A220-300’s range on its website as 3,200nm with 141 passengers.
Powered by Pratt & Whitney’s PW1500G geared turbofan, the CSeries competes for the lower end of the narrowbody market alongside the Embraer E2 and Mitsubishi Regional Jet, and to a lesser degree designs from Sukhoi and COMAC.
The C Series Aircraft Limited Partnership’s (CSALP) head office, primary assembly line, and related functions are based in Mirabel, Québec.
A second assembly line was also being established in the United States at Mobile, Alabama.
There have been 402 orders for the A220 family of aircraft at September 30, 2018, according to the Airbus website. So far eight A220-100s and 37 A220-300s have been delivered.
Its biggest customers are Delta Air Lines (75 aircraft), airBaltic (50 aircraft) and Air Canada (45 aircraft). The only airline customer in Asia is Korean Air, which has eight A220-300s in its fleet and two more on order.
