A220’s Performance Drives BermudAir’s Fleet Growth

While many airline fleet planners clamor for a stretched variant of the Airbus A220 closer to the heart of the narrowbody market, Adam Scott—chief executive of BermudAir—is interested in going even smaller after placing a firm order for 10 Airbus A220-300s at last month’s Farnborough International Airshow.

Scott recently told Leeham News and Analysis that he would eventually like to operate A220-100s, the smallest aircraft in the family, on targeted “thin” routes in the Americas.

“Generally, people have been looking to upgauge rather than downgauge, so everybody’s looking for stretches; everybody’s calling for the A220-500,” he said. “That typically works for a lot of the routes that [airlines] would otherwise fly these aircraft on. We’re also looking more at performance. We still spend a lot of time looking at the A220-100. Where we’re going with the -300 is very exciting, and I think it’s the right aircraft for us, but we reserve our interest in also exploring longer-term what the -100 can do in markets where that may make more sense.”

BermudAir will configure its incoming A220-300s with 135 seats—likely with 12 business-class seats and 40 premium economy seats. Economy class will be arranged in a two- to three-seat setup.

The carrier’s fleet-growth plan calls for seven A220s by the end of the year, at least 10 jets by the end of 2027, and more than 20 A220s by the end of the decade.

BermudAir’s fleet of four Embraer E-Jets will be phased out as leases expire in coming years, eventually making the carrier a single-type Airbus operator. But the carrier is not rushing to retire its Embraer aircraft, which Scott said are a “step up in terms of customer experience versus some of our competitors,” while it waits for the potentially transformative A220 order.

Longer, Point-to-Point Routes

“In layman’s terms, the A220 is to my mind the narrowbody equivalent of what the [787] Dreamliner represents,” he said. “All of a sudden, you can fly longer, more point-to-point markets, with greater efficiencies. Our markets like Bermuda have 65,000 people, and we don’t need a 200-seat aircraft. We’ve done really well with 70, now 96 and soon to be 135 seats as we’ve matured and grown these markets.”

A July 22 press release from BermudAir notes that the order was placed by “affiliated company Odyssey,” with aircraft to be operated by BermudAir. Scott clarified that the A220s have been on Odyssey’s order book for about 15 years, and it has finally firmed those delivery positions with Airbus.

Indeed, BermudAir’s order for the single-aisle Airbus jets has roots that were set well before this year's Farnborough show. Scott has been involved with the A220 program “since it was a paper airplane on a drawing board in Montreal,” when the aircraft was in early development as Bombardier’s C Series.

20th Century Odyssey

In the late 1990s, Scott founded Odyssey, the British airline start-up that had ambitions of launching narrowbody service out of London, targeting underserved markets that were overlooked by major carriers. The project struggled for years to secure slots, however, while encountering a series of regulatory, political, and market-based hurdles along the way. The business itself became something of an odyssey—an irony Scott is aware of, as he calls the saga both “Homer’s story” and “the painful voyage.”

Scott, a former Goldman Sachs banker, developed the plan to fly Airbus A318s out of London City Airport, avoiding the clogged arteries of London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports.

“At the time, I was working with the various OEMs on aircraft that had the capability of flying out of London City, and really that was how I got into aviation,” he said. “I figured we had to find a way to leverage this fantastic asset that’s in our backyard, London City Airport, and to do transatlantic, to do things where we could avoid using the larger hubs and improve the overall experience for customers.”

The idea could be considered ahead of its time, as transatlantic narrowbody operations have become normalized in the era of the Airbus A321LR and A321XLR, as well as the Boeing 737 Max 8. Those single-aisle jets have allowed operators to hit near- and central-European destinations from the East Coast of North America, with the likes of Montreal’s Air Transat making a nearly full-time job out of targeting secondary cities such as Lyon and Bordeaux in France, rather than jostling with global carriers at Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport.

Today’s latest-generation narrowbody jets were not available when Scott launched Odyssey, however. In 2011, the company reached an agreement with Bombardier to acquire an unspecified number of C Series aircraft. As the plan to fly out of London City Airport struggled to get airborne, that contract between Odyssey and Bombardier was eventually absorbed by Airbus, which completed its acquisition of the C Series program in February 2020, after taking a majority stake in 2018 and rebranding the aircraft as the A220.

Embraer E-Jets For Now

Scott’s vision has found a new home in Bermuda. In September 2023, BermudAir operated its first passenger-carrying flight, launching with a single Embraer E175 regional jet. The carrier has since added another E175 and a pair of larger E190s, for a total of four E-Jets.

The airline experienced early growing pains; it quickly abandoned an initial all-business-class configuration in favor of segmented seating. But it has also steadily added round-trip routes between Bermuda and the East Coast of Canada and the U.S. It also operates flights originating in North America to the Caribbean, with a planned network expansion including destinations in Central America and South America.

“It has been a long-term vision of being able to operate a fantastic aircraft, a game-changing aircraft, and it happens to make a lot of sense for our model that we’ve developed and continue to develop with BermudAir,” Scott said.

Specifically, the A220’s performance capabilities are well-suited for often challenging island-to-island operations, which involve constrained airports, small runways, and windy approaches.

“We had a very positive view of the C Series when Bombardier first launched it, and the program has been maturing,” Scott said. “The initial kinks have been ironed out with respect to the GTF [Pratt & Whitney’s geared turbofan engines]. Although it has been a long time coming, we’ve gone out and proven a great case and a great model with BermudAir, which is rapidly growing. They say the best things take time and certainly that’s our view here.”

While BermudAir had a strong incentive to stick with the C Series/A220 order it signed so long ago, company executives explored other options. As a current E-Jet operator, the airline heavily considered the A220’s most direct competitor, Embraer’s E195-E2.

“Embraer has been fantastic,” Scott said. “They build beautiful machines, and the E2 is a fantastic aircraft as well. But for us, the A220 has some really great performance attributes that only the A220 is capable of.”

Targeting Skinny Routes

While the A220's seat economics are generally favorable, that advantage depends heavily on filling the aircraft near its maximum passenger capacity. Otherwise, the added trip cost that comes with operating a larger, heavier jet relative to the E195-E2 can eat into margins. As with all airline operations, success will hinge on demand, which is not a given as the airline intentionally targets "skinny" routes that would not support larger narrowbody operations.

While the E195-E2 is extremely efficient in the one- to three-hour range, BermudAir’s operational base is 650 nautical miles away from major cities in the Northeast U.S., and it has aspirations to fly to Midwest cities such as Chicago. In other words, the A220’s nearly seven-hour range is particularly advantageous for the start-up airline.

“It’s not a problem for us to fly from here to Chicago, but when you’re returning from Chicago, you need to be able to have that range,” he said. “Plus, you need to have the contingency of being able to fly back to the Eastern seaboard.

“That’s just one example,” he added. “If you look further afield, at some of our other markets where we’re operating from the Northeast U.S. and Canada down into the deep Caribbean…all of a sudden, the flexibility of that range performance really kicks into high gear.”

BermudAir has immediate plans to expand to Grand Cayman, Turks and Caicos, Belize, and Guatemala. It is also looking east, to the Azores, as a future destination for A220 flights.

“There are a lot of opportunities in the markets that we’re looking at—markets where we don’t have direct competition,” Scott said. “We’ve got the right-sized aircraft, suited for those markets. You know where the point-to-point demand exists but just hasn’t been satisfied up until this point.”

Leading up to firming the A220 order, BermudAir did not seriously consider the recently FAA-certified Boeing 737 Max 7 as an alternative, according to Scott, who acknowledges that the carrier’s leadership “looked at everything.” The Max 7 is a higher-capacity aircraft than the A220-300 and is significantly more costly to operate.

“When we were looking at aircraft, it really was always a question of looking at the E2 or the A220,” he said. “That’s sort of our sweet spot, though there’s always some opportunistic ideas, and we can pivot on a dime.”