C Series engine deliveries should normalize next year, Bombardier says

A Bombardier official said Monday the company expects to receive on time the Pratt & Whitney Geared Turbofan engines for its C Series jetliner beginning next year.

Nearly two weeks after Bombardier cut its 2016 C Series delivery forecast because of delays in receiving the engines, the CEO of Pratt & Whitney’s parent company told investors it wouldn’t hit its Geared Turbofan delivery forecast this year.

“This year, we talked about delivering about 200 engines,” United Technologies Corp. CEO Gregory Hayes said Friday at a Morgan Stanley investor conference in California. “As I stand here today, I think that number is … more like 150 engines for the full year.”

Bombardier Commercial Aircraft spokeswoman Marianella de la Barrera said Monday that Bombardier knew about the delay before it was announced by Hayes. On Sept. 6, Bombardier cut its 2016 delivery forecast from 15 C Series deliveries to seven.

“We were proactive in that regard,” de la Barrera said. “We did this in order to minimize the financial and operational impact to our customers.”

She said Bombardier meets “very frequently” with its suppliers and because of that knew that Pratt & Whitney would not be able to fulfill this year’s C Series engine allotment.

“We’re expecting that in 2017 we will have recovered the (delivery) schedule,” de la Barrera said.

Hayes said Pratt & Whitney isn’t receiving all the parts for the Geared Turbofan in a timely fashion. The engine has 800 parts on it, but it’s “about five parts that are causing us pain.”

One of the five parts he identified was the engine’s fan blades, which are made “around the world but assembled in one place.” He said it’s taking 60 days to make the blades, but it “needs to be 30 (days).”

The fan blades are one of the last parts to go on the engine. Pratt & Whitney is “building the engines at a pace we need to,” save for the blades, Hayes said. “We’ve got a lot of inventory at Pratt & Whitney that’s waiting to be shipped.”

During a question-and-answer session with a Morgan Stanley analyst at the conference, Hayes said Pratt & Whitney would be able to deliver between 350 and 400 Geared Turbofans in 2017, in spite of the “huge ramp in production.”

“We’ve just got to execute,” he said.

De la Barrera said there are agreements in place about compensation for missing delivery dates, “conditions that will be expected to be honored.”

“We have no reason to believe that these obligations won’t be met,” she said, adding that Pratt & Whitney has been a long-time supplier to Bombardier.

Bombardier, which employs about 1,800 people in Wichita, was already two years behind schedule and $2 billion over budget before delivering its first C Series CS100 airliner in June to Swiss International Airlines. Swiss has since taken delivery of a second CS100.

This story was originally published September 19, 2016 at 5:57 PM with the headline "C Series engine deliveries should normalize next year, Bombardier says."