De Havilland Canada and Bombardier

Canada is a vast country of lakes, forests and remote settlements, many reachable only by air. That geography produced one of the most distinctive aircraft makers in the world, a company whose planes are still flying into places nobody else can reach. It also produced a rival that took on Airbus and Boeing, and lost its airliner business doing it. This is the intertwined story of De Havilland Canada and Bombardier.

Built for the bush

De Havilland Canada (DHC) was incorporated in 1928 near Toronto as a branch of Britain’s de Havilland company, the firm that would later build the Comet. After the Second World War, DHC turned to designing aircraft for Canada’s own needs, and produced a run of legends:

• DHC-2 Beaver (1947): a tough, simple single-engined bush plane that could fly on wheels, skis or floats. It became the definitive bush plane.
• DHC-3 Otter (1951): a bigger version for heavier loads.
• DHC-6 Twin Otter (1965): a twin-engined short take-off and landing (STOL) aircraft, still the go-to choice for extreme airstrips. It’s the aircraft that lands on Barra’s beach, at Saba and in Nepal’s mountains.

The Dash 8: a regional airliner

DHC moved into airliners with the Dash 7, a four-engined STOL airliner, and then the far more successful Dash 8, introduced in 1984. The twin-turboprop family grew over the years, culminating in the stretched Q400. It’s unusually fast for a turboprop, which lets it compete with regional jets on longer routes. It became the main rival to the ATR 72.

Ownership changed repeatedly. Boeing bought DHC in 1986, then sold it to Bombardier in 1992.

Bombardier’s jets: the CRJ

Bombardier, a Quebec company that started out building snowmobiles, became a major aircraft maker by buying up struggling firms, including Canadair, De Havilland Canada and Learjet. Its biggest airliner success was the CRJ (Canadair Regional Jet), developed from the Challenger business jet and in service from 1992. Along with Embraer’s ERJ, it created the regional jet boom of the 1990s and 2000s. Later stretched versions like the CRJ900 still fly huge numbers of US regional flights.

The CSeries: a great aircraft, a heavy price

Bombardier’s boldest move was the CSeries, a clean-sheet airliner for about 100 to 150 passengers, bigger than its regional jets and aimed at the lower end of the A320 and 737 market. It entered service in 2016 and pilots and passengers praised it: quiet, efficient and roomy. But development had cost billions more than planned, and sales were slow against Airbus and Boeing.

In 2018 Bombardier handed control of the programme to Airbus, which renamed it the A220. Under Airbus, with its global sales force, orders grew strongly. The A220 is still built at Mirabel, near Montreal, the same site once planned as Montreal’s giant passenger airport, as told in our white elephant airports story.

Bombardier then left the airliner business entirely. In 2019 it sold the Dash 8 programme and the De Havilland Canada name to Longview Aviation Capital, reviving DHC as an independent company. The CRJ went to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in 2020. Bombardier now builds only business jets.

Sources & Further Reading

• De Havilland Canada — Wikipedia ↗
• De Havilland Aircraft of Canada — The Canadian Encyclopedia ↗
• Bombardier CRJ — Wikipedia ↗
• Bombardier exits commercial jet sector with CRJ sale — Global News ↗
• Airbus A220 — Wikipedia ↗