C (3:07)

So if you're Boeing, you've got the 321 Neo squeezing from the top and then it was concerned about the CS 300 and an eventual 500 from the bottom. Exactly.

A (3:20)

Boeing blocked Bombardier deal with United States in 2016 with a batch of ultra low price 737 700s and actually concurrently revamped the original 2011 design for the 737 Max 7 with a slight stretch. Actually, technically it was a shrink of the Max 8 instead of optimizing around the Max 7 size. That would give it more seats and more range to fend off the A200 2300, or what we now know is the A2 2300 CS300 the time. An irony of ironies, those United 700s were later converted into United's launch order for the Max 10 in 2017 and the Max 7 relaunched, reconfigured in 2016. Well, both of those airplanes aren't done yet. Almost a decade later, the CS 500 was a phantom. And it was haunting Boeing. So much so that it was the catalyst for Boeing to sue Bombardier at the International Trade Commission. Back then, the Commerce department under the first Trump administration levied 300% tariffs on any imported C Series aircraft after Delta bought 125 of them to save the program. And by the way, for you aviation history Buffs, that was 10 years ago this week. In short, Boeing alleged that Bombardier was dumping the C series into the US at crazy low prices, doing harm to the US domestic aircraft industry, specifically against the 737 700, which no one was even seriously buying back then. The key revelation during that trial, which brings us back to today in the HE20 stretch, is that Boeing acknowledged that the threat was not the CS300 against the smallest members of the 737 family, but the not yet launched entirely conceptual CS500 against the incoming Max 8.

B (5:08)

John, let me stop you there for a second because what you're saying I don't quite believe. And the reason that I don't quite believe it is because you talk about Fred Cromer at Bombardier in 2017 and he was upset because the U.S. government was trying to kill his Canadian airplane. But just, just to be clear here, it's the same Fred Cromer who's now Spirit's cfo, right? A man who's part of this team that's begging the U.S. government for taxpayer cash to save his Florida airline. Same guy.

A (5:41)

Amazing business, isn't it?

B (5:42)

It certainly is.

C (5:43)

Protectionism is just a matter of how you look at it.

A (5:47)

Okay, that unbelievable irony aside, this was coming at a time of peak Boeing arrogance. Look, their stock was soaring on huge cash flows and their suppliers were being strangled in the process. They were throwing their weight around and wanted the US government to kill the C Series before it even got out of the gate.

C (6:04)

If I remember this right, and I definitely do not follow this as closely as you do, John, but this was one in a series of dominoes that led Bombardier into Airbus's arms, right? Just a massively, terribly conceived effort by Boeing all around that ended up hurting them.

A (6:21)

Yeah, this was actually going on while Boeing was talking to Embraer about their own possible tie up. But this absolutely hastened and massively weakened Bombardier. The ITC ended up throwing the whole thing out, ruling in Bombardier's favor. But look, the die was cast. Bombardier, which had been massively over budget on the C Series development, effectively now had a near death experience in the market that it needed most. This is precisely the reason that every A200 2300 for the United States is built in Mobile, Alabama. You can't dump a US made read assembled airplane into the US market. That was eight years ago now. And Airbus got a majority stake in the C series program for a dollar and the A220 was born.

C (7:03)

So John, the A220, now part of Airbus, they're pretty happy with the 3 hundreds. But what is the real tension here with do we go 500 or not?

A (7:14)

That tension is declining rapidly. Honestly, I think that the big focus for Airbus now is getting the industrial house in order. Before they can do that, I had an interview with CEO Guillaume Ferri last fall where he said profitability has to precede the development of a stretch. And I think that was very much to impress upon their industrial teams and their suppliers the urgency of getting that right before they Got the big prize which would guarantee the future of the program, which is the stretch, fundamentally. Airbus has not made money on this airplane yet.

C (7:48)

Wait, they paid a dollar for it?

A (7:50)

Exactly. I mean, that says a lot about how challenging it is to industrialize a commercial aircraft program all on its own. Forget the massive development costs, which are almost considered like sunk dollars at this point, but really the goal right now is righting the ship of the industrial base to get to their goal is, you know, 12 per month in the next few years. And they have been somewhere just a little more than half of that at this point. They acquired Spirit Aerosystems. Boeing got their part for the 737 program and the other Boeing programs. Airbus got a lot of the A220 infrastructure along with A350 stuff that spirit was doing. But a lot of this is the wing of the A220, made in Belfast, Northern Ireland. They're trying to figure out how they make money on all of this and lean out and integrate all of these different work packages. And so that's slowing things down also. But again, that's the tension, not whether or not they do this. As Guillaume Ferre has always said, this is a when, not an if.

B (8:53)

John, I know things move relatively slowly in aircraft manufacturing, but this is at this point, what, a 20 year old idea, right? Ish. At this point, is this still considered a technologically advanced airplane or has the world caught up?

A (9:11)

I think it is still a technologically advanced airplane, but that's only in the context of just how old, quote unquote, the A320 and 737 are. I mean, look, tech reporters are spoiled. They get a new product every 18 hours, right? We have to wait five to seven years for anything new to come along. And frankly, the tempo of new is even more elongated. In the 90s, there was just derivatives and clean sheet airplanes raining from the sky across multiple manufacturers. Now this is what we have to wait for. And so, yes, it represents the newest clean sheet airplane development in the west that's available. So that's what we're getting here. So, yes, relative to what it's competing against, yeah, it's definitely better and a more advanced platform, given all of the advances in technology that Bombardier was able to capture. It's effectively a miniature 787 in a lot of ways. Obviously not as composite carbon fiber as the 787. It's got an aluminum lithium fuselage. But there's a lot of systems, architecture similarities and material advances in the wing. Yeah, I mean, it's inherently a lighter, more advanced airplane optimized at this size, as opposed to the stretched and shrunken A320s and 737s that have appeared over the years.

B (10:31)

Let's take a break here and when we come back, John is going to get into what this airplane can and can't do and why. It was a threat to Boeing then, but not really one now.

C (10:47)

Airline customer operations people, listen up. It's 6:00am A weather system has just canceled or delayed a third of your morning departures. Your call center goes from 200 calls an hour to 2,000 to channel the movie Speed. What do you do? What do you do?

B (11:04)

Honestly, you just create a crazy long queue of callers and hope you either get to them eventually or they find another way to get help.

C (11:11)

Yeah, that sounds right and terrible because here's what that looks like from the other side. Your flight just got cancelled. You open your app and it says, sorry, call us. So you call, you wait. 45 minutes later, someone picks up and asks you to confirm your booking reference.

B (11:26)

I have been that passenger more times than I want to admit.

C (11:30)

But if your airline had Delight AI, it could be different. Delight AI is an AI agent platform built specifically for airlines. When a flight gets canceled, it does not wait for passengers to call in. It reaches out proactively through calls, text, WhatsApp, whatever channel that passenger prefers checks real time availability and gets them rebooked end to end before they ever touch a hold queue.

A (11:52)

So the passenger is not waiting on hold or even calling in. It just happens. And they get a text with their new options.

C (11:57)

Exactly. And the system knows who that passenger is. A frequent business traveler who needs an aisle seat and a tight connection gets different options than a family of four who just need to stay together. The right flight for that specific traveler, not just the next available one.

A (12:10)

But isn't connecting into all of the airline's existing systems a nightmare? Airlines running a patchwork of reservation platforms, loyalty systems, contact center software, all from different eras.

B (12:19)

This is exactly what Delight AI spent over a decade solving. They have built the communications infrastructure to sit on top of whatever systems an airline already has. No rip and replace. Airlines are typically up and running in days, not months.

A (12:35)

And it's paying off over 80% containment rates, meaning most passenger issues get fully resolved before ever reaching a human agent.

B (12:42)

And when something does need a human, the agent sees the full conversation history, the passenger profile and everything the AI already tried, all pre filled on the screen. They pick up right where the AI left off.

C (12:56)

If you want to Take your airline customer experience to the next level. Visit Delight AI Travel. That's D E L I G H T A I T R A V E N L.

A (13:12)

And we're back. We're looking at this chessboard again. Or to horribly mix a metaphor, this airplane, the A220 stretch, really is Moneyball at its finest. One of the many things that I really do love about aircraft design is that it's the process of creating something where everyone involved has to compromise. Absolutely nothing comes for free on an airplane. It's really a question of who you're trying to serve and how. And managing those compromises is ultimately the name of the game. And when you're developing a derivative aircraft head to head against a competing product, it's really about maximizing the benefit for the lowest possible development costs. In baseball terms, as the three of us are inclined to think, Moneyball is how you efficiently buy runs, which in turn buys wins. Home run hitters are expensive. Teams are seeking statistical probabilities of getting on base. Getting on base equals runs. Runs equal wins. That's what they're buying. Quick historical aside, and everything has an aviation angle. Boeing kicked Airbus with the 777 300er because they had to make fewer changes to the 777 200er in the 300 to achieve transpacific performance than Airbus needed to do for the A340 to do exactly the same RIP A34600. That strategy, two engines for long haul with the 777 300ER massively hastened the demise of the 747 400. That was Boeing's Moneyball at the time.

C (14:40)

Okay, so you're saying the A2 2500 is the Scott Hatterberg of the Airbus lineup here?

B (14:47)

We're really taking this deep.

C (14:49)

People have seen Moneyball even if they haven't read the book. It's. Anyway, back to the point. What can this experience tell us now? So we think about that experience, right? These are meaningful gains with small tweaks. Now you've got this derivative where an A2 2500 looks pretty similar to an A3 20, maybe, depending on how they do this. What does that do to the equation here?

A (15:15)

Yeah, the A320 Neo definitely has more range than what an A220 stretch would have. But look back before Airbus acquired the program, one C series sold was one less a 320 or 737 sold. I think the goal here is for Airbus to actually cannibalize itself in kind of the Same way that Boeing did with the triple seven versus the 747. This is duopoly Dynamics, not triopoly anymore.

C (15:40)

Right.

A (15:40)

But Bombardier is out of commercial aviation, so it really becomes a very different kind of competitive response. And I think where this makes perfect sense is because it lets Airbus split production more evenly. A321neos, both in the regular LR and XLR flavor, are the airplanes Airbus really wants to be building. They command a higher price, and the marginal cost of building them versus the smaller A320 is kind of negligible. This lets Airbus open up more capacity for bigger A321s with demand shifting. It's all upside there.

C (16:12)

Right. And with the original A220s, you were cannibalizing the 319s or the 737. Seven hundreds, as you said, which those were already sort of on the way out from. From a production standpoint, there weren't a lot of orders coming in, except for Boeing basically giving United the deal of the century. So it wasn't as big of an issue. The A320 was more of an issue. But now, I guess in the new world, it's about the NEOs and then maybe the max nines and tens, whenever that gets certified. So then you can focus on that and then more a 220s get built, which lets Airbus further accelerate production on that and then get the volumes it really needs to make money. So. Okay, I got it, Brett.

B (16:53)

I'll stop you there. About United and the deal of century. It was such a good deal, apparently, that one of the first things that Scott Kirby did when he took over United as president was decide he didn't want those airplanes. Right? And sometimes an airplane is a dog at any price.

C (17:10)

Yeah, well, nobody wants 124, seat 737.

B (17:14)

Indeed not. But the future, it sounds like, looks better. John, tell us a little bit more about the Stret. What do we know about that airplane today? What is it likely to be?

A (17:24)

Yeah, so we don't know a ton about the stretch right now, but what we do know can still tell us a lot. Physics is great that way. So we know what's not changing on the airplane. The wing, though there will probably be changes to the winglet, the engine, and the maximum takeoff weight. That last piece is actually probably the most important here. Everything that I've heard about the stretch points to Airbus holding the maximum takeoff weight, the MTAU, at 70.9 metric tons, or about 156,000 pounds. You guys remember during our 7-8710 episode we talked about the MTAU as the container you aren't allowed to overfill. Well, this is the next chapter of that lesson. You're taking one capability, a transcontinental A220, 300 with about 140 passengers or so in two classes, and you're trading it for more seats. That's the compromise here.

C (18:22)

All right, so the container, if we're going to stick with that, stays the same size and then you're just changing how you're filling it. You're putting a lot more people in, which means there's less room for other stuff. Exactly.

A (18:33)

Airbus is using the remaining room in the MTOW container, in this case to add more airplane structure in the form of a longer fuselage to make room for 20 more passengers. That's four rows at a 220 is five abreast. That's probably somewhere in the realm of 125 to 135 extra inches in length. And that leaves less room for fuel before that MTOW container reaches its max capacity. So, like, this airplane's range is going way down as its weight is going up. From a network perspective, this is a north south airplane. This is not an east west airplane. All this adds up to an A220 stretch that is designed really for short range flying. This is the MD90 replacement. That was an airplane that was optimized for flights of around up to about 2200 nautical miles. Think Detroit to Atlanta, D.C. to Atlanta, or Detroit to Dallas, for example. I stress again, I haven't seen any firm brochure numbers for this plane yet, but crucially, those performance figures would fall off pretty quick with shorter Runway lengths, higher elevations and higher temperatures.

B (19:44)

John, where do engines fit into all of this?

A (19:47)

I'm glad you asked. This is an airplane that's gone through a few significant iterations. As we mentioned, it really started off at Bombardier Gate as a simple stretch. More fuselage, more passengers, less range, and yes, more passengers, lower seat costs. Okay, story time. In 2022, Airbus turned the whole thing on its head. Then Chief Commercial Officer Christian Scherer wanted an A220 stretch to be a transcon airplane with the same range as the A200 2300 at about 3400 nautical miles. Airbus spent two to three years focusing on this and trying to get CFM to offer an adapted Leap 1B. That's the higher thrust engine on the 737 Max for the A220 stretch alongside Pratt Whitney's PW1500G engine.

B (20:36)

Okay, so we've established that for Airbus, this is not going to cannibalize any sales because Airbus wants to push the much larger A321 Neo and XLR. But this does sound a little bit like a Max 8 competitor to me. Is Airbus trying to take on Boeing directly here? Especially considering that the Max 8 is a very profitable airplane for Boeing?

A (21:03)

Yeah, I had the exact same thought at the time. Shearer said taking on the Max 8 wasn't the goal. The argument he made at the time was that the A220 stretch was an airplane that existing A220 operators could grow into. It fundamentally represented a ceiling for that category of airplane, and he posited that a 737, 800 or a Max 8 operator would want to look at something as a base for them to grow up from, rather than a ceiling, which they would hit for the A220 family with that stretch. But I honestly really think that missed the point at the time, given how jumpy Boeing has historically been about direct attacks on its most valuable assets. In this case the Max 8, which makes up a huge, huge portion of its total backlog. Something like 40% or something like that. It's. It's mega. That direct run, regardless of a floor or a ceiling, was aimed at the max 8. I don't care what you say. Like, they look very similar. Airbus could have the A220 family at one end and the A321 at the top, and volume pricing for both. There was very limited downside commercially to being able to offer these concurrently.

B (22:17)

Okay, so if I am cfm, which is a joint venture between GE and Safran, why would I put essentially my engine on this airplane if it would threaten sales of another airplane that I already have exclusivity on and cannibalize another in which I have a dominant share and speed up the retirement of the 7378 hundreds, an airplane that I'm making a lot of money on because of overhauls for aging engines.

A (22:48)

There's not a whole lot of incentive to dive in here, especially with whatever the development costs would have to be to adapt the engine to the A220 in the first place. CFM didn't bite. So last year, things turned back around to the simple stretch strategy. Again, Airbus came full circle. Scherer, now the retired head of the commercial aircraft division at Airbus, told me in Dubai last November that he was wrong about what airlines wanted for a generation. They complained about the A320 and A321 not having full transcon capability. And he really internalized that when listening to what customers wanted, which was the ability to run different size airplanes on the same route depending on the time of day or time of year or whatever. So Right now, the A220 stands as an airplane with the same engine as the smaller a 200 2300, that's the PW1524G. The 24 stands for 24,000 pounds of thrust. You can do a lot with that engine. And the 300, like the 100, it's very overpowered with a very generously sized wing. But with the heavier stretch 220, you're talking about running at the highest thrust levels for a heavier aircraft. And that's also going to put an extra strain on the engine. So Airbus and Pratt are figuring out how the engine maintenance costs are going to work for that airplane. That's one of the last big pieces here.

B (24:11)

Okay, so now they may be building an airplane that doesn't fly very far. Is this a problem for any airlines? Some want short range, but presumably some want an airplane that can go farther.

A (24:23)

Well, that depends who you're asking. I think if you're asking Delta, Air France, Air Canada, or even Air Baltic with an existing fleet of A220, three hundreds in a network of aging A320 CEOs, older generation that are flying way less than a thousand miles every day from Atlanta, Paris or Montreal.

B (24:42)

Why are you leaving out Riga, John?

A (24:44)

A lot of love for Riga. I actually really want to go to Riga here. It's a beautiful city. Riga too. I mean, look, the European continent is inherently smaller than the U.S. so you have a lot more flexibility when you have less range. But look, this airplane is being positioned ultimately as a A320 CEO replacement, not even an A320 Neo replacement, and definitely not making a run at the max 8. This is an airplane that makes a whole lot of sense for those carriers, potentially with an accompanying sharp drop in per seat costs when you stretch it. If you're JetBlue, on the other hand, not so much. They really push their A320s and A220s if you look at the network, a lot harder than those other four airlines and really use the range of both fully loaded. So really, you're not going to get the kind of legs you want out of Boston.

B (25:33)

All right.

C (25:34)

I don't know that I'm sold on this yet. I guess we'll find out if the airlines are or not, but they're all busy dealing with all kinds of chaos right now. So when do we see this actually come to fruition?

A (25:48)

Could be as soon as this summer at the Farnborough Air Show. But the industry discussion is, as you rightly note, heavily tilted away from chasing derivative airplanes that by the way, are expensive to purchase potentially and more in favor of flipping over couch cushions for gas money.

C (26:04)

Okay, so maybe early next decade, I don't know.

A (26:08)

Well, look, given the track record of his industry, a derivative, even a simple in quotes one, is probably now into 2030.

B (26:17)

It does sound like maybe Boeing doesn't have that much to worry about. You said the A220 stretch is not a transcontinental airplane. It has a row and a half less of seating than the Max 8, which can fit up to 189 passengers. And then this stretch, it can't do hot and high, so it's not much of a threat to Boeing.

A (26:38)

It's not. I mean, and I think that's deliberate on Airbus's part. That's part of where the strategy is at here. They're going out of their way to say they're not aiming at the max 8. And airlines who are evaluating this thing tell me that it's not a Max 8 replacement and would be stupid to position it as one. Letting Boeing continue to build the 737 and grow the backlog reduces the urgency for an all new airplane at the plane maker. This airplane, as it is, as once potentially phenomenally disruptive to a duopoly, now really looks like it's preserving the status quo. But there's a twist. Airbus said the exact same thing about the A321 versus the 757 back in 1989 when the stretch A320, now the A321 came to the fore. That airplane a quarter century later came along with a bunch of upgrades and a new engine generation. And that's the reference airplane for the single aisle sector. Today, when it comes time for Airbus to Finally replace the A321 with its next generation single aisle program, the NGSA, it will have two all new engines available, just like the 321 back for the Neo. That pokey short range A220 stretch potentially becomes a transcontinental airplane with a notional A220 Neo. And most importantly, Airbus then can baseline that all new airplane of theirs one rung above the 320neo. So two A220s and two NGSA models. I think it's increasingly clear that the A220 stretch isn't about the 2000-30s, it's about getting on base ahead of the 2000-40s. Man, this game is sportier than ever.

B (28:18)

Thank you so much Professor Ostrower. You've been listening to a wonderful palate cleansing episode of the Air Show. If you have suggestions or questions for us, or if you're interested in sponsoring the podcast, go to our website theairshow podcast.com to get in touch.

C (28:37)

Leo Duran produced and edited this episode. Our calming and soothing theme music is by Joshua Moser. Thanks for listening and we'll be back soon.

A (28:46)

Sam.