Bombardier Archives - Leeham News and Analysis

BermudAir's fleet planning strategy offers a compelling counter-narrative to the prevailing wisdom in narrowbody aircraft selection. While much of the industry attention on the Airbus A220 program centers on demand for a stretched A220-500 variant—which would push into A320neo territory and compete more directly with Boeing's 737 MAX 7—BermudAir CEO Adam Scott is signaling interest in the opposite direction: the smaller A220-100. This positions BermudAir as something of an outlier among airline planners, most of whom are chasing upgauge opportunities to capture scale economies on growing route networks. Scott's rationale is rooted in BermudAir's specific market reality—thin routes to destinations like Bermuda, where a market of 65,000 potential passengers doesn't support 200-seat aircraft but has already proven receptive to steadily growing gauge, from 70 seats up through a planned 135-seat configuration on the A220-300.

The order itself—10 firm A220-300s announced at Farnborough, with plans to exceed 20 aircraft by the end of the decade—represents a significant fleet transformation for a carrier that launched scheduled service only in 2023 with Embraer E-Jets. BermudAir's approach of maintaining its E-Jets during the transition, rather than rushing retirement, reflects a pragmatic operational stance many startup and niche carriers should note: don't sacrifice a "step up" in customer experience for fleet commonality before the economics and delivery timeline justify it. The E-Jets will be phased out only as leases expire, allowing BermudAir to become a single-type Airbus operator on a measured timeline rather than an abrupt one—a lesson in disciplined fleet transition planning that avoids the pitfalls of premature aircraft retirement seen elsewhere in the industry.

For working pilots, particularly those at regional and niche long-thin-route carriers, this story underscores a broader trend: the A220's value proposition isn't merely about range or capacity, but about unlocking point-to-point markets previously uneconomical with larger jets. Scott's comparison of the A220 to the 787 Dreamliner's impact on widebody route economics is apt and increasingly common among airline executives—both aircraft enabled airlines to bypass hub-and-spoke constraints and fly direct to markets that couldn't previously support scheduled service. Pilots transitioning into A220 fleets, whether at BermudAir, Delta, JetBlue, or Air Canada, are increasingly flying an aircraft type whose mission profile blurs traditional lines between regional and mainline flying, with implications for pay scales, scope clause negotiations, and career progression at carriers still operating dual regional/mainline structures.

More broadly, BermudAir's interest in the A220-100 variant, which has seen comparatively soft demand across the airline industry, suggests the -100 may find a durable niche among carriers serving genuinely thin, underserved markets rather than fading into irrelevance as Airbus and lessors focus marketing efforts on the larger -300 and hypothetical -500. This matters to fleet planners and operators evaluating regional jet alternatives, especially as Embraer remains the sole Western manufacturer still producing traditional regional jets following Bombardier's exit from that market and Mitsubishi's SpaceJet cancellation. As LNA's broader coverage of the A220 program—including Bjorn Fehrm's analysis of whether an A220-500 would require a new wing and engines—makes clear, Airbus faces real strategic tension between stretching the family upward to challenge the 737 MAX and preserving the smaller variants' efficiency advantages on the thin routes where the aircraft family originated as the Bombardier CSeries. BermudAir's order, small in absolute terms, is a useful data point illustrating that not all airline growth strategies converge on the same upgauge logic dominating headlines from larger network carriers.