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The Airbus A220 flies with a sidestick and envelope protection like an Airbus, but it requires manual trimming and provides speed stability like a Boeing. The fly-by-wire system running on the aircraft’s triplex flight control computers was not designed by Airbus. It was designed by Bombardier’s CSeries engineering team in Montreal before Airbus acquired the program in 2018. The team studied both the A320 and the 777, rejected both approaches, and built a hybrid system that combines Airbus-style protection with Boeing-style conventional handling feel. Chief test pilot Chuck Ellis said the result “behaves like the Cessna 152 the pilot trained on.”
The aircraft carrying that system nearly did not survive to enter service. Bombardier spent approximately $6 billion developing the CSeries, nearly double the original estimate, and was forced to give Airbus a controlling stake in 2017 after Boeing filed a trade petition that threatened to shut the aircraft out of the US market. Bombardier exited commercial aviation entirely in February 2020, selling its remaining stake for $591 million. The A220’s fly-by-wire system remains one of the most distinctive in commercial aviation, a design that belongs to neither the Airbus nor Boeing philosophy and that Airbus inherited rather than created.
The A220’s FBW Took The Best Ideas From Both Airbus And Boeing
Airbus | Simple Flying
The Airbus A220’s fly-by-wire system was designed by Bombardier’s CSeries engineering team in Montreal before Airbus acquired the program in 2018. The team studied the A320 and the 777 and deliberately chose not to copy either. The result uses Airbus-style sidestick controllers and envelope protection but pairs them with Boeing-style speed stability and manual trim requirements. Chuck Ellis, the CSeries chief test pilot, described the handling: “The A220 behaves like the Cessna 152 the pilot trained on. This puts his muscle memory in the right mode if he gets in trouble and has to rely on direct FBW mode.”
The distinction matters because the A320 does not feel conventional. On the A320, the pilot commands a flight path angle, releases the sidestick, and the computers maintain that angle without trim input. The A220 requires the pilot to trim for a desired speed, and the aircraft holds that speed when the stick is released. If the pilot wants a different speed, the pilot retrims. This is how conventional aircraft work, and it is how Boeing’s FBW aircraft work.
The Bombardier team combined that conventional feel with Airbus-style protection, producing a system that keeps pilots’ manual flying skills current while preventing them from exceeding the aircraft’s limits during normal operations.
What C*U Control Law Means & Why It Matters
The A220’s flight control computers run a control law designated CU. At low speeds, a sidestick deflection commands a pitch rate proportional to how far the stick is deflected. At higher speeds, the same deflection commands a load factor measured in g. The C component handles the blending between these two modes. The U stands for speed stability, the feature that separates the A220 from the A320 in the cockpit.
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When the pilot releases the A220’s sidestick to neutral, the computers return the aircraft to 1g flight, and the nose seeks the pitch attitude that maintains the trimmed airspeed. If the aircraft slows below the trimmed speed, the nose drops. If it accelerates above, the nose rises. The pilot must use the trim switch on the sidestick to set a new reference speed. On the A320, releasing the sidestick holds the last commanded pitch attitude regardless of what happens to the airspeed. The aircraft holds attitude, not speed.
The practical difference is most apparent during the approach. On the A220, a headwind gust that increases airspeed produces a slight nose-up pitch response because the speed stability function resists the speed change. A gust that reduces airspeed produces a nose-down response. The pilot feels speed changes through the pitch axis the same way a pilot flying a 737 or a Cessna 172 would. On the A320, the same gust changes the airspeed, but the aircraft holds its pitch attitude, and the pilot must notice the speed change on the instruments and correct it manually. The A220 keeps the pilot connected to the aircraft’s energy state through conventional pitch cues that the A320’s control law does not provide.
Envelope Protection That The Pilot Can Override
The A320 uses hard envelope protection. The flight control computers will not allow the pilot to exceed certain angle-of-attack, bank angle, or speed limits regardless of how much force the pilot applies to the sidestick. If the pilot pulls the stick fully aft, the aircraft pitches to the protection limit and stops. Airbus’s design philosophy is that the computers should prevent the pilot from placing the aircraft outside its certified flight envelope under any circumstance.
Boeing’s 777 and 787 take a different approach. The FBW systems provide increasing stick forces as the aircraft approaches an envelope limit, giving the pilot a tactile cue that a boundary is near, but they do not prevent the pilot from exceeding the limit if the pilot applies sufficient force. Boeing’s position is that the pilot must retain ultimate authority to maneuver the aircraft beyond normal limits if an immediate hazard demands it.
The A220 includes envelope protection that guards against excessive angle of attack, bank angle, and structural loads, but the Bombardier team implemented them using what Leeham News described as “a clever principle” that differs from the A320’s hard-limit approach. The system provides protection during normal operations while preserving a design philosophy that treats the pilot’s control inputs differently than the A320 does at the boundary. The exact behavior at the envelope limits reflects a deliberate compromise between the Airbus and Boeing philosophies, designed by a team that had the advantage of studying both systems’ strengths and weaknesses before building its own.
How Bombardier Built The CSeries And Nearly Went Bankrupt
Bombardier first studied a 100-150 seat aircraft in the late 1990s, shelved the concept multiple times, and officially launched the CSeries program on July 13, 2008, at Farnborough with two variants: the CS100 seating 100-130 passengers and the CS300 seating 130-160. Development costs nearly doubled from approximately $3.4 billion to roughly $6 billion by the time the CS100 entered service with SWISS in July 2016. The CS300 followed with airBaltic in December 2016.
Sales were slower than projected. Airlines were cautious about committing to a new type from a manufacturer with no track record in the 100-plus seat market, and both Airbus and Boeing responded with aggressive pricing on the A319neo and 737 MAX 7 to defend their positions in the smallest single-aisle segment. By 2016, the Quebec provincial government had invested approximately CAD $1 billion directly in the program, and the Canadian federal government had contributed CAD $372.5 million in interest-free loans.
In April 2017, Boeing filed a dumping petition with the US International Trade Commission alleging that Bombardier sold 75 CS300s to Delta Air Lines below cost, seeking tariffs of approximately 300% on CSeries imports into the United States. The petition threatened to shut the aircraft out of the largest single-aisle market in the world. Delta had placed its order in April 2016 for delivery beginning in 2018, and the tariff would have made the aircraft commercially unviable for any US customer. Bombardier faced a financial crisis from development cost overruns and a market access crisis from the trade action simultaneously.
How The CSeries Became The Airbus A220
Bombardier’s response was to give away control of the program. In October 2017, Airbus acquired a 50.01% controlling share of the newly created Airbus Canada Limited Partnership at no acquisition cost. In return, Bombardier gained access to Airbus’s global sales network, supply chain purchasing power, and a second final assembly line at Airbus’s existing facility in Mobile, Alabama. An aircraft assembled in the United States would not be subject to import tariffs, which neutralized the Boeing trade case. On January 26, 2018, the US International Trade Commission ruled 4-0 against Boeing’s petition, finding no material injury to the US industry, but the Airbus partnership had already reshaped the program’s future regardless of the ruling’s outcome.
On July 1, 2018, Airbus took formal control. The CS100 became the A220-100, and the CS300 became the A220-300. Airlines that had hesitated to order a Bombardier product began ordering an Airbus product built on the same production line in Mirabel, Quebec, with the same engines, the same fly-by-wire system, and the same structure. Cumulative net orders increased 64% in the first 18 months under the Airbus name, reaching 658 aircraft by January 2020.
On February 13, 2020, Bombardier transferred its remaining 33.58% stake for $591 million and exited commercial aviation entirely. Airbus held 75%, and the Government of Quebec held 25%. The company that designed the fly-by-wire system, built the composite wing in Belfast, and spent $6 billion developing the aircraft no longer owns any part of it. The order book has since surpassed 1,000 firm orders after AirAsia’s 150-aircraft commitment in May 2026.
