The father of the C Series enters the aviation hall of fame

Considered by many to be the father of the C Series, Rob Dewar is about to join the select club of the “aviation pantheon”. The honor is individual, but the main interested party insists on sharing it rather than talking about it.

Julien Arsenault
The Press

“Designing these products really takes a team effort, so I really want to recognize what the team has accomplished,” Dewar said in a video call with The PressFriday, on the eve of his induction as a “living legend” as part of the 20^are Living Legends of Aviation Awards, Austria.

In a sign that the 61-year-old insisted on paying tribute to his colleagues, the word “team” was found in the majority of his answers during the interview.

Little known to the general public, this McGill University engineering graduate spent more than a quarter of a century at Bombardier and is currently Vice President, Customer Satisfaction, Services and Product Policy for the A220, at Airbus Canada .

The 60-year-old boarded the plane now called the A220 in the early 2000s to then oversee the development of this new plane – which experienced several bouts of turbulence before seeing the skies clear up.

At the Living Legends of Aviation, Mr. Dewar will swell a select club in which we find, among others, personalities such as astronaut Buzz Aldrin – the second human to have walked on the Moon – and Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon who has allowed Blue Origin to see the light of day. Several actors like Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman and John Travolta, holders of pilot licenses, are also part of the group.

The engineer will not be the only Quebec representative since he will join Laurent Beaudoin, the architect of Bombardier, as well as Marc Parent, president and chief executive officer of the flight simulator specialist CAE.

A purposeful project

Mr. Dewar’s career trajectory could have been quite different. By agreeing to embark on the C Series adventure in the early 2000s, he had to take a leap into the unknown where nothing was guaranteed.

“I was managing 2,000 employees at Bombardier, and I was told, ‘We would like to study this market segment, but there is nothing guaranteed,’ recalls Mr. Dewar. If I accepted this role, I could not go back and find my old position. Still, it only took me a few minutes before I said I was in. »

Although the C Series nearly brought down Bombardier because of the billions that were invested in the program, Mr. Dewar believes that the honor he will receive confirms that the project had its raison d’être.

“I spent half my career on this program and if we hadn’t succeeded, it would have been a deep disappointment,” he says. I am really happy to see that it is based on solid foundations. »