Originally Posted by
Stranger
There are more Rouge flights left and right, YYC-YYZ, YYC-YUL etc. On route that were never intended to go Rouge. Using 763s, which are awful both in J and Y. But yes, that's te way AC is coping. OTOH that the A223 is starting to arrive and enters in service late January may turn out to be a very good thing for AC. Especially if, as it smells at this point, the return of the Max gets further delayed. If they really address seriously the issues raised in the JATR report, which the FAA has said they would, could easily be six months, more like over a year. If the Max does not return before the next recession, many airlines might be happy to do without at that point, very possibly including AC. Mind you, the world needs two strong competing plane makers, so we should hope Boeing redeems themselves and eventually survive in a somewhat chastized mood.
The MAX fiasco won't be the end of Boeing on its own. The problem Boeing is having is not that the MAX has gone tits up. It's that they have about three or four simultaneous issues (including one DOD-related one in the US).
To the extent that anything saves Boeing from themselves, I would expect it to be the possibility of Airbus "sandbagging" a few Chinese order bids (if their queue gets too full) as retaliation for the hacking "thing" in Europe recently. The bigger issue, though, is that Airbus doesn't have the production capacity to totally displace Boeing.