Premium – The CRJ – 25 Years in Production

Some aircraft hit the market just right, and have longevity. Bombardier’s CRJ just hit a milestone last week, as the program is now a quarter-century old.  It joins a handful of aircraft programs with such longevity; the others in production are the 737 at 50 years and the A320 and 29 years.  While the aircraft that have such longevity are typically redesigned or stretched during their lifetimes, the initial airframe design typically sound and efficient.  The CRJ fits that description.

Over the last 25 years, the CRJ program

has been quite successful. Bombardier has seen firm orders exceed 1,900 aircraft from over 120 operators in 90 countries. Using a well-used metric – a CRJ takes off or lands every five seconds. There are around 200,000 CRJ flights per month, and the CRJ has carried over two billion passengers over the last 25 years.

Just like the A320 and 737, today’s CRJ is nothing like the original.  As we can see, this is where Bombardier established its reputation as masters at stretching aircraft. The CRJ began life as a Challenger business jet that was stretched for the regional market.  Since then, the fuselage has been stretched three times and grown to double the passengers carried on the original version.  The CRJ700 model was a major redesign of the original aircraft and formed the basis for the CRJ900 and CRJ1000. Specifications for the various CRJ models are shown below: