RE:RE:RE:RE:Potential revenue stream More similar to CRJ 700/900 but yes you can do CRJ5500 as well as a derivative.
Once the wing and engines are changed you basically reduce the capability of the bizz jet and the cost comes down. Mainly because of engine cost and on-board equipment that are used to make bizz jet self sufficient during ground handling and flying further. Some fuel tanks, and associated structures and hardware will come off too.
Remember bizz jets are expected to land at remote and/or under services airport with minimal ground support. RJ's are made to fly gate to gate and have ground support equipment for services.
This is why when most regional airlines got rid of RJ's due to lack of demand most went to bone yard or parked for long term storage.
Recall there was and still is big demand for used bizz jet that caused their price to climb. No one converted RJ's to feed the bizz jet market.
Again i dont know if this will ever happen, but if so then it can be done at low cost. Wings of current CRJ can be used on Global 8000 with different wingbox, engine cost will be covered by GE. They already have RJ engines. Fuselage of Global 8000 is made of aluminum-lithium which is more advanced and lighter then CRJ. Dont get me wrong it will cost multi millions but its fraction of billions to make all new.
Mitsubishi will have to do something in few years time. They have spent billions and found out that they dont know how to build airplanes. They spent 100's of million to buy Bombardier's CRJ to gain access to market. As CRJ gets old and retired, Mitsubishi cash flow and presence disappears too. Mitsubishi provides a lot of aero structures for Global jet program so it would be natural to build on that.
PabloLafortune wrote: So stockit, if I understand correctly this would be more or less a 5500 on an 8000 fuselage at a lower price than an 8000? Would that not have biz jet potential as well? Personally, I don't see a problem of re- entering commercial space market so to speak if Mitsubishi is taking on all the business risk associated with dealing with the airliners. Basically Mitsubishi is the customer, it's just another Vistajet. Because as we all should know by now, there's a lot of fixed costs in this business, the marginal cost is much lower than the fully loaded cost so more volume = more profit unless you make desperate deals to gain that volume. Here what Bombardier would be doing is simply leveraging their existing designs and facilities. What they can't be doing is signing onerous contracts.