Bombardier is still not ruling out acquiring part of its former Belfast site to safeguard production of the Global and Challenger fuselages that are built there.

Speaking during a second quarter results presentation on 31 July, chief executive Eric Martel described the Northern Irish plant – the troubled owner of which, Spirit AeroSystems, is in the process of being acquired by Boeing – as an “important asset for us”.

One outcome is that Bombardier continues to source the aerostructures from Boeing, with Martel admitting that the process of carving out and buying a section of the facility – which also makes wings for Airbus’s A220 – would be “very complicated”.

However, he adds: “We will see what will happen next. We remain open to an acquisition. We are focused now on getting the right quality of fuselage we need to build our planes.”

Bombardier owned the former Short Brothers plant from 1989 until its sale to Spirit in 2020, manufacturing structures for its business jets and designing and producing the wing of the then-CSeries, before the programme’s transfer to Airbus, which renamed it the A220.

Bombardier also reports its strongest quarterly order tally in more than a decade, largely thanks to an order for 50 Global and Challenger jets, with 70 options, from an unnamed new customer.

The commitment, reported on 1 July and valued by Bombardier at $1.7 billion, helped boost the Canadian airframer’s backlog in the second three months of the year to $16.1 billion – a year-on-year increase of $1.9 billion. The manufacturer’s book-to-bill – the ratio of new orders to shipments – also rose to 2.3.

With 36 aircraft deliveries during the quarter – three fewer than in the same period last year – revenues at the Montreal-based firm fell 8% to just over $2 billion. However, Martel says demand remains strong for all its products and the company is on track to meet its 2025 guidance.

Martel points to strong performances by Bombardier’s growing service operation as well as its Wichita-based defence business.

Services revenues were up 16% year-on-year to $590 million. The airframer, which has been investing heavily in its services footprint in recent years, is building a new maintenance facility in Abu Dhabi and adding a paint shop at London Biggin Hill.

He says there is “strong traction” for its defence products – Bombardier largely supplies platforms to prime contractor partners – as countries step up military spending. Among its programmes, the manufacturer is developing with Italy’s Leonardo a Global 6500-based maritime multi-mission aircraft and collaborates with Sweden’s Saab on the GlobalEye surveillance aircraft, based on the Global 6000.

Martel is confident that threatened punitive tariffs on Canada by the Donald Trump administration will continue to exclude aircraft. “Since [Trump’s election in November 2024] we have always assessed the risk to be low for our industry,” he says, pointing to the fact that aerospace products have been tariff-free across most of the world since 1979 and that the USA is a net exporter.

“Changing that today will be very challenging,” he says.

Bombardier’s sole in-development programme, the Global 8000 – an update of its Global 7500 flagship – flew for the first time in May and continues to be on track for service entry this year, Martel says.