A blizzard in Valcourt

In January 1934 a snowstorm closed the roads around Valcourt, Quebec, and Joseph-Armand Bombardier could not get his two-year-old son Yvon to hospital in time. The boy died of peritonitis. Bombardier, a self-taught mechanic who had built his first snow vehicle at fifteen, threw himself into a machine that could float over snow. In 1937 he patented a sprocket-and-track drive and sold the B7, a seven-passenger snow coach used as a school bus, mail van and ambulance in rural Quebec. On 10 July 1942 he incorporated L’Auto-Neige Bombardier. The aerospace giant began as a response to a family tragedy.

The Ski-Doo typo

The small personal snowmobile came later. In the late 1950s Bombardier finally had a rubber track light and tough enough for a one- or two-seat machine. He meant to call it the Ski-Dog, a replacement for the trapper’s dog sled, but the name was painted on the prototype as Ski-Doo — and he kept the mistake. Bombardier sold 225 in the first year and 8,210 four years later. When the founder died of cancer in February 1964, aged 56, his son-in-law Laurent Beaudoin eventually took charge, and the company went public in 1969 and bought the Austrian engine maker Rotax in 1970.

Buying the broken ones

The oil shock of the 1970s hurt snowmobile sales, so Beaudoin diversified into trains — Montreal Metro cars, New York subway cars — and then into aircraft. His method was simple and audacious: buy failing companies cheaply and turn them round. In 1986 Bombardier bought the state-owned Canadair, which had just posted the largest corporate loss in Canadian history, for 120 million Canadian dollars. Short Brothers of Belfast followed in 1989, the bankrupt Learjet of Wichita in 1990 and de Havilland Canada, bought from Boeing, in 1992. In six years Bombardier’s turnover multiplied sixfold.

The regional jet revolution

Canadair brought with it the Challenger business jet, and Bombardier stretched its fuselage into a 50-seat airliner. The Canadair Regional Jet first flew in May 1991 and entered service with Lufthansa CityLine in 1992, creating a market for small jets on routes that had been the preserve of turboprops. Including the larger CRJ700, 900 and 1000, some 1,945 CRJs were built. The Dash 8 turboprop, the Global Express, the Learjet 45 and the yellow CL-415 water bomber made Bombardier, at its height, a company with plants in 27 countries and more than 70,000 workers, building aircraft, trains and, until 2003, snowmobiles.

The CSeries gamble

Then came the bet that nearly broke it. The CSeries, a clean-sheet 110-to-150-seat airliner, first flew in September 2013, but costs ran away and orders dried up. In October 2015 Bombardier wrote down 3.2 billion dollars and the Quebec government put in a billion more. When Delta ordered the jet, Boeing complained of dumping and the US Commerce Department proposed a 219 per cent tariff, later struck down. In 2018 Airbus took a controlling stake in the programme for one Canadian dollar, and renamed the aircraft the A220.

Planes only

What followed was a fire sale. The Dash 8 programme went to the owner of Viking Air, which revived the de Havilland Canada name, the CRJ to Mitsubishi, the training business to CAE, the aerostructures plants in Belfast and Morocco to Spirit AeroSystems, the A220 stake to Airbus and the railway division to Alstom for about seven billion euros. Learjet production ended in 2021. What remained was a pure business-jet maker — and a good one. In May 2021 a Global 7500 test aircraft reached Mach 1.015, and its sibling the Global 8000 entered service in December 2025 as the fastest civil aircraft since Concorde. Bombardier delivered 157 jets in 2025.

Fábricas

• Valcourt · Valcourt, Quebec — Birthplace of the company; snow-vehicle factory opened 1940–1941
• Dorval · Montréal–Trudeau Airport, Quebec — Aviation division headquarters and engineering centre
• Mirabel · Mirabel, Quebec — Former CRJ and CSeries line; CRJ built there for Mitsubishi until backlog ended
• Wichita · Wichita, Kansas — Former Learjet works, acquired 1990
• Belfast · Belfast, Northern Ireland — Ex-Short Brothers plant, acquired 1989, sold to Spirit AeroSystems in 2020
• Casablanca · Morocco — Component plant opened 2012–2014, sold to Spirit in 2020

Pessoas

• Joseph-Armand Bombardier · founder, inventor — Patented the sprocket and track drive in 1937; died 1964
• Laurent Beaudoin · president and chairman — Founder’s son-in-law; led the diversification into rail and aerospace
• Germain Bombardier · president 1964–1966 — Founder’s son; sold his shares after a family disagreement

Recordes e pioneirismos

• Global 7500 test aircraft FTV5 reached Mach 1.015 in May 2021, the first business jet to break the sound barrier (b14)
• Global 8000: top speed Mach 0.95, the fastest civil aircraft since Concorde (b14)
• World’s leading business-jet manufacturer by deliveries in 2023, with 138 (b1)
• Largest order in company history: VistaJet, 56 Global jets, 2012, up to 7.8 billion dollars with options (b2)