Fuel-efficient Bombardier jet takes first flight

The CSeries jet built by Bombardier completed its first flight last week, advancing the Canadian planemaker’s ambition to challenge Boeing and Airbus by expanding beyond small regional jets.

It features new fuel-efficient Pratt & Whitney engines, a carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic composite wing built in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and a metal fuselage built in Shenyang, China.

Final assembly is in Montreal, where the 2 ½ -hour test flight took place Monday.

The plane’s engines andlightweight construction promise about 20 percent better fuel efficiency than today’s narrow-body jets.

The CSeries program, first launched in 2004, was suspended two years later for lack of orders. Relaunched in 2007, the program still has secured only 177 firm orders.

Last year, the first flight was pushed out by six months because of assembly problems at its suppliers. Earlier this year, the flight was scheduled for June, but was delayed again when systems and software upgrades didn’t come together in time.

The CS100 that took to the air Monday is a 110-seat model.If all goes well in flight tests, it’s scheduled to enter service toward the end of 2014 or early 2015.

With the second, 130-seat model called the CS300, planned to follow about a year later, Bombardier would move into the market segment of the smaller planes built by Boeing and Airbus.

That larger version will compete head-to-head against Boeing’s 737 MAX 7 and Airbus’s A319neo, which are similarly revamped with new fuelefficient engines but are not scheduled to enter service until 2019 and 2018, respectively.

Sales have gone extraordinarily well for both updatedsingle-aisle plane families - but not in the smallest sizes comparable to the CS300.

Boeing has only 30 firm orders for the MAX 7 out of its total of almost 1,500 MAX sales. Airbus has just 45 orders for the A319neo out of total neo sales of almost 2,400.

So Bombardier’s major competition for this market might be neither Boeing nor Airbus, but Embraer of Brazil, which in June launched a new family of revamped regional jets with the same new Pratt & Whitney engines as the CSeries. Its 106-seat and 132-seat versions are planned to enter service in 2018 and 2019.