| It's probably a great thing for Canada that the Avro project was shut down. The real tragedy was the CSeries/Airbus A220. The Avro was a cool paper project (it is ultimately unknown if it could even achieve the projected performance since no flights were performed anywhere close to the claimed speeds or with real hardware). The Avro didn't serve any purpose, it was rendered obsolete by ICBMs and 50's soviet technology. The plane was made to intercept a nuclear supersonic soviet bomber that... never materialized! The soviets and Americans went all-in with ICBMs, rendering bombers pretty much obsolete (by Sputnik launch it became obvious nuclear payloads would be delivered with ballistic missiles). Would have been a costly, useless plane. The A220 was a complete airliner project with a production line and $52 billion dollars worth of firm orders as of 2020. When the Trump administration slapped tariffs on it Trudeau immediately bowed down, despite the tariffs later being thrown out in courts. All he did was to basically threaten to not buy Boeing fighter jets and instead get f35 from Lockheed (which he was contractually obligated to anyways). No support for the industry, nothing. And that was for a flagship prestige technological project. All he had to do was to be a little bit more assertive and make a capital injection at the right time. Bombardier was swimming in orders, it was guaranteed that the project was going to make money at this point (plane was even certified by the FAA by then). I still don't understand why he reacted so submissively to Trump. Having the CSeries sold to Airbus at a huge discount was foolish: The plane already had a profitable amount of orders. Canadians paid for the R&D, Europeans and Americans are now reaping the benefits. While there was very little the Canadian government could do to save the Arrow, other than maybe building it as a training aircraft, it was 100% possible for the Government to save Bombardier and the A220 program. I wonder if the fact that the company is headquartered in Quebec made it politically impossible... |