Bombardier on Wednesday announced the retirement of Bombardier Aerospace president and chief operating officer Guy Hachey as part of a wider restructuring that will see 1,800 layoffs “in the coming months.”
Hachey leaves the company after six years as COO and during a period in which flight testing of the company’s most high-profile and costly airplane, the CSeries, remains suspended while Pratt & Whitney validates a so-called fix to its PW1500G engines. An oil seal problem caused the failure of one of the engines on the first flight-test vehicle during ground runs, resulting to damage to the airframe and the indefinite grounding of the entire fleet.
The new organizational structure consists of four business segments, namely Bombardier Commercial Aircraft, Bombardier Business Aircraft, Bombardier Transportation and Bombardier Aerostructures and Engineering Services. All four segments report to president and CEO Pierre Beaudoin.
“Guy led Bombardier Aerospace during an important period in its history,” said Beaudoin in statement. “I wish to thank him for his contributions over the past six years.”
The heads of the business segments remain Lutz Bertling at Transportation, Eric Martel at Business Aircraft and Mike Arcamone at Commercial Aircraft. Bombardier said it planned to appoint a head of the new Aerostructures and Engineering Services business segment in the next few weeks. It plans to absorb Bombardier Aerospace group functions and the Customer Services division into the three aerospace business segments, generating reductions in cost and overhead.
“This marks another step in Bombardier’s evolution,” said Beaudoin. “Combined with the implementation of OneBT, the recent Bombardier Transportation reorganization, the new Aerospace organizational structure will enable us to be more agile and flexible in addressing customer needs, while increasing our focus on growth areas. The creation of the Aerostructures and Engineering Services business segment will also help us market our expertise in this field to the aerospace industry, thus generating new revenues. We are setting the stage to take full advantage of our investments and the tremendous growth potential of our new products.”
Plans call for the new Aerostructures and Engineering Services business segment to specialize in the design and development of complex advanced composite and metallic aerostructures in all classes of civil aircraft and all categories of structure, including fuselages, wings and engine nacelles.
The company said it would develop a detailed implementation plan over the next few months and put the new structure in place on January 1.