Bombardier’s private jet bet is working. Can CEO Éric Martel keep the company flying? (2024)

Éric Martel started as Bombardier Inc.’s CEO on a bright, sunny Monday in April 2020, and by 11 a.m., everything had already gone to hell.

The 56-year-old, one of Quebec’s most recognizable executives, with his jet-black hair and black-rimmed glasses, had barely settled into his C-suite at Bombardier’s head office on René-Lévesque Blvd. when then finance chief John Di Bert showed up to deliver an urgent snapshot of the company’s operations. A contagious virus was tearing around the globe, and goverments were closing schools, borders and factories.

Martel knew they were in a fog. But he didn’t quite grasp the extent of it until that moment. Bombardier BBD-B-T had nearly 50 plants around the world, and almost all were shut down, with thousands of employees on furlough. “Nobody’s producing anything,” Di Bert told him.

A quick conversation with executives at the aircraft and train units confirmed the worst: All those planes and trains they were counting on to bring in cash would just freeze in place—huge hulks of metal and wiring in various stages of production with nowhere to go. The lack of revenue was a disaster in the making.

“Billions are going out the door” as he was sitting there on day one, Martel recalls now over supper at Montreal’s posh Saint-James, a private club the company uses as its downtown pied-à-terre now that its headquarters have moved near Trudeau airport. A longtime business-jet customer soon phoned with more ominous news. “He says, ‘Yeah Éric, welcome back, but I’m not sure I’m going to take my order because my fleet is grounded.’”

Martel characterizes what followed as cold water to the face—a moment of clarity as he contemplated the repercussions of a global health emergency. He remembers eating a sandwich he’d made himself for lunch—because no restaurants were open—and staring out the window at the orange sign adorning the tower of Hydro-Québec, the employer he’d left just weeks before. Then he looked down to the street. On the normally car-choked, six-lane downtown boulevard, a single automobile passed by.

Whoa—this was already a big challenge, Martel remembers thinking. But it’s going to be a much bigger one than I thought.

Martel had led Bombardier’s private-jet business before leaving for a five-year stint at the provincial utility. He came back to a company heavily indebted and under intense pressure. The manufacturer was on a dizzying road to reinvention, selling or shutting down assets that had represented 65% or more of its revenue. He had to complete that task and figure out a new plan for the remaining private-jet business—the orphan in what was once a vast stable of money-making Bombardier assets—all while navigating havoc in the supply chain courtesy of COVID-19.

But as operations gradually came back online, the health crisis delivered a surprise: a strong tailwind for private aviation. A few short months after he started—and with the company’s transformation to pure-play business-jet maker well underway—the pandemic became an unexpected gift to Bombardier. As Martel puts it: “We got lucky.”

The outbreak created what many analysts are now calling a structural increase in demand for private air travel that might otherwise have taken a decade or more. For Bombardier, it allowed the company to build up an order backlog to anchor its business faster than it thought possible. It now has a pipeline of work stretching about two years. And that guy who was going to cancel his order? He called back a few months later asking for even more jets than before.

Business has boomed, fuelling a financial turnaround that has never in recent memory felt on more solid ground. And Martel’s other revenue generators—a growing service business and budding defence unit—are starting to pay off, as well.

Long-term debt, which topped US$10 billion only a few years ago as the result of massive development costs for the CSeries airliner program, has been whittled down to about US$5.6 billion. By the end of next year, Martel expects to achieve a debt-to-earnings ratio as low as two times, which will open up a whole new layer of capital-deployment possibilities. Bombardier could even buy back shares or reinstate a dividend—unthinkable just a few years ago.

And yet, Bombardier’s journey is also very much a story of what might have been. The Quebec industrial icon once employed 80,000 people across six continents. It was one of the first Canadian global industrial conglomerates, with the size and swagger to match. Launched as a snowmobile maker out of a garage in Valcourt, Que., in 1937, the company (with a strong nudge from governments) became the third-biggest commercial aircraft maker in the world and a top-five manufacturer of rail equipment. It also dabbled in banking, airport operations and short-range air-defence missile supply.

It was founder Joseph-Armand Bombardier’s son-in-law, Laurent Beaudoin, who steered the company to its greatest heights out of sheer necessity, after Ski-Doo sales tanked amid the 1970s oil crisis and heavy competition. Beaudoin’s new corporate vision became diversification, and a special class of multivoting shares allowed the family to make the long-term bets that saw the company balloon in size—until much of it came crashing down.

Today, Bombardier’s hopes of flipping the commercial airliner market on its head with a 100- to 150-seat jet have long evaporated. Bombardier sold the CSeries to Airbus for next to nothing. Plans to turn its rail unit into a transport juggernaut for the 21st century are equally toast—Bombardier sold the entire thing to France’s Alstom, ending a five-decade run that saw it build subway systems for New York City and Montreal, streetcars for Toronto, and high-speed trains in Europe.

In a way, the company looks like a genius for unloading those units. Airbus is struggling to make the CSeries (known now as the A220) profitable. Alstom is having serious trouble finishing off costly train contracts signed by Bombardier. As for the snowmobile business, that was spun off years ago (the family remains involved as owners).

The new Bombardier is certainly much easier to understand. It does one single thing: sell and service corporate jets with eight-figure price tags to the who’s-who of global decision-making. Given its chronic underperformance over the past 20 years, getting that right and delivering returns to shareholders is a victory in and of itself. And it remains one of Canada’s biggest manufacturing exporters and the heart of our aerospace industry, with a proven ability to invent and build next-generation planes, even if it couldn’t always commercialize them. At least, that’s the positive spin.

Those with a harsher take might see it another way: that Bombardier finds itself on the wrong side of the fence on two of the world’s most pressing existential crises. At a time when environmental concerns are becoming more acute, and the gap between rich and poor is growing, its factories are pushing out some of the priciest and most polluting status symbols on Earth.

In fact, to shield itself more against market shocks, Bombardier has shifted its business to building the largest and most expensive of these private jets, making it more dependent than ever on the world’s financial elite.

How Martel plays the cards he’s been dealt will determine whether Bombardier will continue its steady climb or struggle anew. The company has industry-leading products to drool over and a leadership team determined to build on that advantage. And now we’re seeing the beginnings of a shift in strategy from diversification to resilience. Bombardier is no longer counting on different divisions to offset others if things go bad. Rather, it’s beefing up what’s left to better resist a downturn to begin with.

Still, it’s fundamentally different than its main rivals in a key way, says Mehran Ebrahimi, an aerospace specialist at the Université du Québec à Montréal. U.S.-based General Dynamics’s Gulfstream and France’s Dassault Group are both major military contractors whose defence divisions offset and feed into their aviation units. Bombardier is building a new military arm, but it will likely never reach the size of its rivals. That leaves the Canadian company more exposed.

“Things are going well right now,” Ebrahimi says. “But they have one egg in the basket. And that worries me.”

Bombardier’s biggest-ever gamble nearly pushed the company to ruin.

On a bone-chilling day in February 2015, the company’s newest commercial airliner took off for its first airborne test at Montreal’s Mirabel Airport. Gathered near the runway, a small group of customers, employees and media rubbed their hands and stomped their feet in a desperate attempt to stay warm. The jet sped up and was gone in mere seconds, eating up an astonishingly little amount of pavement. A splash of hoots and applause marked the moment.

The plane was the CS300, the biggest in a new family of single-aisle jets called the CSeries that Bombardier developed to fuel the next decades of commercial aerospace revenue. Their development was Bombardier’s largest-ever project, a make-or-break push funded in part by loans from the Canadian, Quebec and U.K. governments. The bet was that passengers, sick of flying through major airport hubs, would appreciate a direct link on a single-aisle jet slightly smaller than existing Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 aircraft. And that by manufacturing a plane with 15% lower operating costs, it could make it financially viable for airlines. It was an ambitious move but also a miscalculation. Bombardier soon found itself in the crosshairs of a commercial airline duopoly with much deeper pockets.

Bombardier’s board had given the green light for the CSeries in 2008, the same year Pierre Beaudoin—Laurent’s son—took over from his father as CEO. By the time he left seven years later, Bombardier was reeling from rising debts, a plummeting stock and ballooning costs for its marquee plane. Orders for the jet were tepid, stymied by Boeing and Airbus. The train business wasn’t faring much better: A US$1.9-billion order for high-speed double-deckers for Switzerland’s Swiss Federal Railways, for example, was years late.

Adding to the strain, the company was also trying to develop two other all-new aircraft: the Learjet 85 (since abandoned) and the Global 7500 (which it brought to market and hypes today as the world’s largest and longest-range business jet). Even at the highest levels, there were worries it was taking on too much. One senior executive described it as “mission impossible.”

What few knew at the time is that Bombardier had already concluded it couldn’t go it alone on the CSeries. The plane was late to market and over budget. It had already sucked US$6 billion in cash to develop, and scaling up production would suck billions more before the program became profitable. Bombardier couldn’t make that work, and Alain Bellemare was brought on as CEO to find a safe place for the plane to land.

“Alain came on primarily to help me figure out the CSeries,” says Beaudoin, now Bombardier’s chair, who joined Martel and I for supper at Club Saint-James.

Just seven months after Bellemare joined, Quebec flew to Bombardier’s rescue with a US$1-billion equity investment in the CSeries. In 2017, he would strike a deal that would see Airbus take over the program, with Bombardier and Quebec as minority investors. He’d sold the water-bomber division in 2016, and later the Q400 turboprop unit and the CRJ regional jet franchise. As Beaudoin explains, once the decision was made to unload the CSeries, the rest of the commercial aircraft business didn’t make much sense.

Still, it wasn’t enough to fix Bombardier’s fundamental problem: an excessively weak balance sheet trying to support two remaining capital-intensive businesses—private planes and trains—while debt maturities loomed. For fiscal 2019, the company paid US$732 million in interest on revenue of US$15.7 billion and tallied a net loss of US$1.6 billion. Things were so shaky that salespeople with rival business-jet manufacturers carried Bombardier’s ugly financial statements with them on sales campaigns.

Their pitch: Don’t buy from them because they’re going down. As Bombardier managers confessed, it was exceedingly difficult to sell a multimillion-dollar jet amid a whisper campaign about your impending death.

Pension fund giant Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec had already taken a 30% stake in Bombardier’s train business for US$1.5 billion, and Ottawa chipped in with $373 million in reimbursable loans for business-jet development. But that still didn’t provide the cushion the company needed to get a grip on its debt. One of the businesses would have to go. The board began exploring strategic options in the summer of 2019, and a few months later, Bombardier pulled out of the CSeries partnership entirely to preserve cash. (Read more about the Caisse in “Hot on the Caisse” on page 34.)

There were serious talks with U.S. aerospace giant Textron Inc. that yielded an offer for the private-jet unit and discussions with Japan’s Hitachi Ltd. on the train business. Bombardier also looked to Alstom, entering into weeks of negotiations that derailed several times. In the end, Alstom bought the business, making it the world’s No. 2 train maker, behind China’s CRRC. It’s now locked in a fight with Bombardier over contract provisions related to the sale at the International Chamber of Commerce’s International Court of Arbitration.

Beaudoin says choosing whether to unload trains or planes was debated heavily by the board, and based as much on future prospects and geography as anything else. Offers for the two businesses were in the same ballpark, but Bombardier had just spent a lot of capital to develop the Global 7500, and it was keen to reap the rewards, building on a lineup that already enjoyed decent margins and a strong competitive position (28% revenue market share over three years to 2019). But the bigger factor was Bombardier’s footprint and history. If it kept trains, it would essentially have a company with its centre of gravity in Europe. And it wasn’t prepared to make that leap.

“Our roots are here,” says Beaudoin. “How we built Bombardier has been in Canada.” It came down to “which business we felt the most comfortable” with, he says—including the relationships fostered over decades with private-jet customers.

Once the decision was made, Bellemare was out and Martel in. Beaudoin says he wanted the best person he could find to stabilize the company and grow it with its refocused vocation. As the guy who’d run the private-jet unit before and already knew the business inside out, Martel was the obvious choice. The company was still a mess. Employees were demoralized, and its share price had tanked to lows not seen in a quarter-century.

Martel jumped at the opportunity. “There was no hesitation,” he says.

His first order of business was finalizing the three deals negotiated by his predecessor. COVID initially slowed things down, but Bombardier would eventually complete them in rapid succession, selling the CRJ business to Japan’s Mitsubishi for US$550 million in cash in June, its aerostructures unit to Spirit AeroSystems for US$275 million in October, and its train business to Alstom for net proceeds of US$3.6 billion in January 2021.

Martel then brought on Bart Demosky as chief financial officer, plus a clutch of others he’d worked with previously. Together, they articulated a five-year strategy in March 2021 that hinges on winning a steady stream of business-jet orders, paying down debt, and dramatically increasing aircraft repair and service capability. They also want to build out Bombardier’s defence business, tripling its revenue to more than US$1 billion in the second half of the decade.

So far, it’s working. Since Martel started, Bombardier’s annual adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization have climbed to US$1.2 billion from US$200 million, while EBITDA margins are up to 15.3% from 3.5%. Revenue has taken off, too, rising to US$8 billion at the end of 2023 from US$5.6 billion in 2020. The company is selling more jets (138 last year) and has paid down US$4.6 billion in debt. In April it rebranded, which is a big deal internally: There’s a winged logo to better reflect its new identity.

That’s come as the industry experienced a structural shift with increased demand for private jet travel. For about a decade after the global financial crisis, selling luxury jets was a predictable affair in a crowded market. Total billings for new aircraft amounted to about US$21 billion in 2019, according to the General Aviation Manufacturers Association (GAMA). Competing for that business were seven major plane makers with several dozen models between them, chasing 809 sales.

COVID changed the game. Business travellers said goodbye to first class on regular airlines and booked private charters instead. Those who already had their own planes valued them even more. Private-jet flight hours climbed. And sales for new planes surged as used jets became harder to find. GAMA numbers show the top five business-jet makers today enjoy an order backlog worth US$50 billion at last count, up from US$27.3 billion in 2020. Bombardier alone has boosted its order book by about a third.

Data from business-aviation intelligence firm WingX shows business-jet activity as measured by flights is up 32% this year through April versus 2019. Flights in the Middle East have dropped off because of geopolitical tensions, and the European market has slowed. But the U.S. market is still growing. Visitors flying in on business jets to this year’s Masters golf tournament in Georgia were 15% more numerous than last year, WingX data shows. Their ride of choice? Mostly Cessna Citations and Bombardier Challengers.

For business leaders and wealthy individuals, it all boils down to time, says Rolland Vincent, a former Bombardier executive who’s now director of Jetnet iQ, a Texas-based market intelligence service for business aviation. “Suddenly they said, ‘You know what? I’ve got three homes. I’ve got a complex business structure. My family is distributed. My kids are away at college. I need to link all of those together, because life is short.’”

All of this bodes well for Bombardier, allowing Martel to beef up his order book and providing more visibility on what’s to come. And other pieces of the business should help, too. By 2030, Demosky thinks half of Bombardier’s sales could come from service, defence and the pre-owned plane unit, which would bring in steady cash and provide a predictability that’s been absent for years. The company is eyeing acquisitions or partnerships to fill in the gaps in its own operational capability.

If Martel can get free cash flow consistently positive at a high level and hit his 2025 targets, particularly an 18% EBITDA margin and leverage at 2.5 times or better, the company’s turnaround can be considered complete, says National Bank analyst Cameron Doerksen. A history of poor performance stretching back to 2001 has certainly left a scar with many investors. And the CEO will likely have to prove he can deliver consistent results over several years before convincing the most forceful skeptics. But the company is pushing through the clouds to clearer skies ahead, Doerksen says. “The stock is progressively becoming more investable.”

Martel is walking the factory floor of Bombardier’s Global jet-completion centre in Montreal, a small entourage of executives in tow. Two shiny Global 7500s (list price US$78 million) and one Global 5500 (US$46 million) are parked in the white-walled delivery bay, going through final checks before the formal handover to their owners. Some buyers will retrieve their aircraft themselves, Martel says. And there’s often a small ceremony to mark the occasion, with short speeches and even tears. For the skilled tradespeople making these planes and the customers buying them, the exchange of a machine that can fly more than 14,200 kilometres at a top speed of Mach 0.925 (about 1,000 clicks an hour) can get emotional.

Martel used to run this plant years ago. And in a way, he’s very much “one of the boys” every time he visits. It was he who designed Bombardier’s Toyota-inspired board-check systems and workflow processes, moving the jet down the line as it gets built—something he learned from seeing the automaker build prefab homes. And it’s Martel who’s now championing the importance of transparent problem-solving, with a constant tally of what’s going right and wrong, and quick communication with senior-level executives if they need to get involved.

The biggest issue these days? Engines. Two of the three manufacturers Bombardier uses are struggling to deliver, and Bombardier has dispatched its own employees there and to other suppliers to better anticipate issues, Martel says. At one smaller parts maker, Bombardier workers outnumber the supplier’s own staff. “I’ve got an army there right now,” he says. “It’s a takeover, basically.”

If Martel is serene about the situation, it’s likely because he’s on top of it. Those who know him describe him as industrious and conscientious, a leader who thinks several steps ahead and can rally people to his side. Growing up in Quebec City, he was an army cadet at the nearby Valcartier base and at 18 was put in charge of all 2,000 cadets in the unit. He got an engineering degree from Laval University but says that in terms of leadership and management, his cadet experience was just as important in shaping who he is today. “I learned a lot about myself, and what I could do and not do,” Martel says. “We did physical training. Went into the forest. Survival. I remember a lot of black flies in those forests. It was tough. That’s where you test your limits as a teenager.”

No one was surprised when he applied to military college. His dream was to become a pilot, but he was rejected because his eyesight wasn’t good enough. He was devastated. They offered him a spot as a navigator and work in the control tower, but he said no. Instead, he pursued electrical engineering—and was almost immediately hired after graduation to lead a manufacturing team at a Procter & Gamble plant on Montreal’s West Island, an area with a significant anglophone population.

“I was the little guy from Quebec City, and I barely spoke English,” he recalls. Meanwhile, half his team spoke only English, and many were old enough to be his parents. “They didn’t see me as their boss. At the same time, it worked. We got stuff done.” He went to Kraft Foods in engineering and production, and later to engine makers Pratt & Whitney and Rolls Royce. He started at Bombardier’s train division in 2002 before moving to the aerospace arm, where he was put in charge of the Challenger and Global lines.

Those two planes are now the core of Bombardier’s business. Sales teams in various corners of the world are following leads and tracking the shifting fortunes of the well-heeled in their hunt for prospective customers. And they’re hitting on fertile ground. The number of ultra-high-net-worth individuals (US$30 million in net assets or more) has grown over the past five years and now tops 425,000. Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index shows the combined net worth of the world’s 500 richest people swelled by US$1.5 trillion in 2023 after falling the year before. “The Silicon Valley guys, a lot came up fast,” Beaudoin says. “We got to cultivate relationships there.”

Martel moved three years ago to push Bombardier’s lineup toward bigger and pricier aircraft, namely the mid-size Challenger and large Global, and end production of small-cabin Learjet models. That decision is now paying dividends, because the wealthy customers who can afford those planes are less affected by inflation and downturns than those buying smaller aircraft. The company’s customer list is closely guarded, but if CelebrityPrivateJetTracker.com is accurate, Elton John, Matt Damon, Tom Cruise and Mark Cuban all fly Bombardiers. Fleet operators like NetJets are also big clients.

Hundreds of jets Bombardier sold 20 or 25 years ago are now getting to an age where they require more maintenance and service. The company smells a huge opportunity to capture more of that higher-margin business in the years ahead now that it has an installed base of customers to justify the investment for new service sites. Says Beaudoin: “The fleet grew, and the team started to say, ‘Bring your jets home.’ And that’s where now it’s feeding on itself.”

Over the past two years, Martel has opened new service centres in Miami and Melbourne, launched construction of another in Abu Dhabi, and expanded sites in London, Singapore and Paris. In all, he’s added a million square feet of service space and hired more than 250 new technicians. The CEO expects the business to generate revenue of US$2-billion by the end of this year.

Still, selling to the rich isn’t all cake and candy. Business aviation continues to have an image problem. As concerns over climate change grow, criticism of private-jet flying is morphing from a blast against cavalier corporate execs into something else: a knock on environmental responsibility. Kylie Jenner was called “a full-time climate criminal” by one user on X after reports she was taking flights as little as 17 minutes long in her Bombardier 7500. And when customers ask Bombardier to incorporate real gold in their jet’s bathroom, as one client did, according to Martel, it does little to reassure the average person that the wealthy aren’t completely out of touch.

According to Transport & Environment, a clean-transport campaign group based in Europe, just 1% of people, including the super-rich, cause 50% of global aviation emissions. The group says private jets are five to 14 times more polluting than commercial aircraft when measured per passenger, and 50 times more polluting than trains. Feet to the fire, some celebs have abandoned private flying almost entirely. Formula 1 world champion Lewis Hamilton sold his candy-red Bombardier Challenger in 2019 as part of a move toward a greener lifestyle, the Daily Mail reported. Other jetsetters like Taylor Swift and Jeff Bezos are buying carbon credits to offset their emissions.

Martel is fully aware of the gravity of the issue but offers some context. People think that business-jet users are always partying and having fun and going on vacation, he says. “But the reality is the guys we’re selling airplanes to, it’s a productivity tool for them.” Clients are often making quick visits to cities thousands of kilometres apart, he says. And it would be impossible to do that on commercial flights. In many ways, a Global or Challenger jet is an airborne office.

The CEO says the aviation industry has a history of making technology improvements to reduce emissions and that today’s aircraft are worlds different from those in the 1960s. He offers Bombardier’s own EcoJet research project as an example. In a remote, undisclosed location in Canada, the company is now exploring new technologies in aviation aerodynamics, flight controls and propulsion in a bid to cut emissions by half. An unmanned prototype with an 18-foot wingspan was launched last fall in the most recent round of testing. Its key feature: a blended wing-body design that, like the fins of a stingray or wings of a flying squirrel, could generate more lift and cut drag. Less drag means less fuel consumption, which in turn means lower emissions. Roughly 90% of Bombardier’s current R&D budget is earmarked for emissions reduction efforts.

It’s not a new concept. Similar research on blended wing-body design is underway in the U.S. Prototypes could eventually lead to a new Bombardier aircraft, Martel says. But that’s years away. He says the most obvious solution to reduce emissions in the near term is sustainable aviation fuel, made from non-petroleum feedstock. At the moment, supply is low and the price is high, restricting widespread use. But he and Beaudoin say there might be a path to make it work. And it runs through the very people who are now being demonized as planet killers.

“I see business aircraft users as a group of people who can force change,” Beaudoin says. “Engage them into it. And then you can start having supply of sustainable fuel at a higher price.” Adds Martel: “Our customers, if it’s available, they’ll jump on it. They’ll use it. They won’t matter about paying the extra. If they help to create the supply chain of fuel, eventually the price is going to come down.”

Maybe the most intriguing piece of Martel’s five-year strategy is Bombardier Defense. The unit sells modified private jets for high-altitude reconnaissance, signals intelligence and other applications. Bombardier makes up to a dozen specialized planes annually, but Martel thinks it can build many more. He says defence could become a US$1-billion business. If it was “an afterthought” before, it’s a priority now.

It’s probably a shrewd bet. Nations are boosting their military spending in the face of ever-growing threats and geopolitical tensions. Bombardier aircraft were heavily used in U.S. military missions over Afghanistan, and the company says they can be adapted for many other special-mission and defence roles. The company last year won a U.S. Army contract that will see its Global 6500 jet serve as a prototype airframe for a new spy-plane program.

Martel figures there will be demand for about 375 defence-related aircraft over the next 10 years. If he can nab just a piece of that spending, Bombardier can further expand its revenue sources. The business might not deliver the same income or counter-cyclical protection its train business did in its heyday. But it doesn’t come with the same set of contract problems, either. Development costs to meet a government’s specs are typically borne by the government.

Having a stronger military business brings a less obvious benefit, too, says Dan Fong, an analyst at Veritas Investment Research. It gives the state justification for having your back in the event you get into financial trouble. If you’re able to secure a contract for a mission-critical piece of equipment, you become indispensable. “In a crunch, that government probably has no choice but to help you out,” he says. That’s not why Bombardier is pushing hard on defence, he says, but it’s part of the bigger picture.

Martel was hoping to give its nascent business a boost with an offer to supply the Canadian military with new submarine-hunting aircraft to replace its aging fleet of Aurora surveillance planes. Instead, Ottawa snubbed Bombardier and struck a sole-source deal with Boeing in November worth up to US$6 billion for the American plane maker’s P-8A Poseidon, a modified version of its 737 jet. Bombardier’s CEO spent weeks pressing the government to hold an open competition for the contract, pitching a made-in-Canada solution with partner General Dynamics he said would be a “game-changer” for the Canadian economy and lay the foundations for a stronger domestic military manufacturing base.

Government ministers, however, prioritized urgency and proven equipment in their decision. They said Bombardier’s proposed aircraft, while based on its Global business jet, existed only on paper, while the Poseidon has been used for years by Canada’s allies. Never mind that six years earlier, Ottawa declared Boeing an industrial partner it couldn’t trust—an assessment that came after a high-profile trade dispute involving the CSeries airliner. Boeing had claimed Bombardier cheated U.S. trade rules by selling CSeries jets to Delta Air Lines at “absurdly low prices” while benefiting from unfair subsidies from the Canadian and Quebec governments. The U.S. International Trade Commission eventually ruled against Boeing, but Bombardier suspended CSeries sales to the U.S. while the fight dragged on.

Bombardier’s bosses are still bitter. Says Beaudoin: “What upsets me the most is the company that kept us out of the U.S. for two years is Boeing. And then we Canadians turn around and give business to Boeing.” Martel insists he could have met Canada’s timeline. Smart countries have a private-sector industrial and government strategy that feed on each other, he says. But in Canada, that’s now absent. Our government is “lacking vision,” he says, and it hasn’t articulated a high-level plan. “I’m the CEO of the biggest aerospace company in Canada, and I don’t have a clue what the strategy is,” says Martel. “There’s none. There’s no aerospace strategy in this country.”

It’s a familiar complaint. In a 2019 report, the Aerospace Industries Association of Canada said Ottawa needs to articulate a new long-term vision and public policy for the sector that builds on past successes. As traditional aviation powers like the U.S. and France, and new entrants like China, move quickly to grab a piece of the world’s estimated US$10-trillion aerospace sector, it said, Canada risks getting left behind.

Five years on, little has changed. Plane making is dominated by international players that enjoy tens of billions of dollars in backing from their governments. Meanwhile, Canada thinks it’s in the game but probably isn’t, says UQAM’s Ebrahimi. Bombardier has certainly won taxpayer support from government over the years, but not nearly on the same level of other nations, he says. And it’s not only about money. French and American heads of state are frequently the biggest salespeople for their homegrown planes, whether they be commercial airliners or business jets. Canada, meanwhile, has mostly shied away from such promotion.

That leaves Martel largely on his own—at least for now. He’ll have to find a way to further boost Bombardier’s resilience against economic swings, because it’s not immune to a downturn. He’ll also have to find money to keep innovating, because his bigger competitors aren’t slowing down. A new Gulfstream jet will soon hit the market to compete with the Global 7500, though Bombardier will follow with an improved version called the 8000 next year. Martel says an all-new “clean-sheet” jet design isn’t needed for at least another five years, in part because there’s no revolutionary technology to justify the investment. That will go a long way to reassure investors still spooked by the massive capital spending of yesteryear. As for defence, Martel is probably playing the referee for the next call. He made such a big stink over the Poseidon planes that Canada won’t dismiss Bombardier the next time a contract’s up for grabs.

The CEO takes heart in Bombardier’s ownership, without which the company would have fallen prey to an opportunistic buyer. And he cheers its culture and 18,000 employees, saying they’re as motivated as he is to make Bombardier great again. “It’s a new chapter,” Martel says. “We have ways to grow this company significantly.” You want to believe him. The “little guy from Quebec City” might not have made pilot. But he’s steering an aviation winner now. Here’s hoping it won’t be another wild ride.

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