How Bombardier is cashing in on business elite's love affair with private jet travel

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Planes, trains and snowmobiles comprised the transportation portfolio that Bombardier was riding as the 21st century unfolded.

But the Montreal-based company also was carrying a boatload of debt incurred while building those diverse businesses over several decades, especially the billions it poured into developing the C Series passenger jet, launched in 2008 to compete with Boeing and Airbus for commercial airlines orders.

By 2018, the financial and operational headwinds became too strong, forcing Bombardier's then-CEO Alain Bellemare to begin shedding key assets, most prominently by selling Airbus the C Series program — rebranded as the popular A220 airline. That was followed by divesting the rest of its commercial aircraft businesses, the Learjet brand of private planes and the railway unit. The recreational products entity, featuring Ski-Doo snowmobiles and Sea-Doo personal watercraft, had been offloaded in 2003.

A new management team, headed by CEO Éric Martel and CFO Bart Demosky, took control in 2020. They immediately established an ambitious, five-year strategic plan to reposition Bombardier, with a focus squarely on its sturdiest leg: the high-flying business jet and ancillary services industry. That is proving to be a smart calculation, based not only on Bombardier's almost 40 years of experience in manufacturing and marketing business jets but also the current state of that aviation sector.

Deliveries of business and general aviation aircraft last year topped 4,000 for the first time in more than a decade, the General Aviation Manufacturers Association reported in February. When compared to 2022, all aircraft segments saw increases in shipments,