Corsica, birthplace of Napoleon and a reluctant French possession since 1768, is a hard place to tame, as much physically as politically. The Mediterranean island is dominated by a rugged mountain range that culminates 2,700 metres above sea level on Monte Cinto. Its roads are correspondingly tortuous and, following European tradition, narrow. Since the place has been riven for decades by separatist tensions, the threat of a bomb going off is always disquietingly real. Corsica is a type-A kind of colony.

It could be a hazardous place to spend your summer vacation—especially on a motorcycle. One blink and you're over the cliff. Yet this is where Paul Tellier chose to pass five days in June, utterly alone, riding his rented Yamaha 900 along some of the most treacherous terrain known to man. “I couldn't think about Bombardier,” Tellier recalls. “If I had, I wouldn't be here now. That is some very, very dangerous road.”

Tellier—who made sure not to tell Bombardier's board about the excursion until after it was over—survived the mind-clearing trip without a scratch. The same cannot be said of his current pilgrimage as CEO of “the Bomber.” Since being handpicked by chairman Laurent Beaudoin in late 2002 to save the once-unstoppable plane-and-train maker from oblivion, Tellier, 65, has suffered his share of scrapes and bruises. It has been a frustrating, if not humbling, assignment for the man who was lionized for transforming Canadian National Railways from a moribund, money-losing Crown corporation into a darling of investors and an industry leader. It's been unsettling, too, for many investors, who expected Tellier to somehow execute a CN-style makeover at Bombardier only months into his tenure.

Bombardier, in fact, is still torn by a crisis of confidence unprecedented for a Canadian blue chip (save, of course, for Nortel). The stock price is barely half of what it was when Tellier started on Jan. 13, 2003. It is roughly one-sixth of where it stood at its pre-Sept. 11, 2001, high. Yet Tellier has done everything he can to change this. He's been shaking things up as if Bombardier's two principal divisions were a pair of maracas. Dancing to Tellier's beat has been too much for many managers, who've been sacked for sticking to the more placid pace of the past.

It's been tough, too, for Beaudoin and his in-laws, the Bombardier family, who've seen their treasured trust twisted into an almost unrecognizable form. There's been massive write-offs, a $1.2-billion equity issue and the sale of the company's birthright, the Ski-Doo/Sea-Doo division. A wholesale rationalization—costing 6,600 jobs, or 18.5% of the work force—is under way in the train unit. There's a top-to-bottom reorganization of accounting and financial reporting methods that has employees at every level pulling their hair out as they try to meet Tellier's demands for transparency and, above all, simplicity. Making things simple, it turns out, is complicated.

Not, however, as complicated as the challenge that Tellier faces in the coming months. Bombardier must decide by early 2005 whether to develop a new family of jets in the 100- to 135-seat category. Its current offering of regional jets (RJs) maxes out at 86 seats. Bombardier's only real competitor in RJs, Brazil's Embraer, opted a few years ago to move into the 100-seat stratum. Its E190 series will hit the skies in 2006. Bombardier also looked into the 100-seat market a few years ago, but opted not to proceed with a new plane. That decision has now left it scrambling, afraid of being left behind. To differentiate itself from Embraer's product, Bombardier is contemplating a new family of planes in the 115-to-135-seat range, which would put it squarely in the sights of the two biggest players in the industry—Boeing of the United States and Europe's Airbus.

This is the dilemma that dwarfs all the others that Tellier faces. There's no guarantee the venture will work. But without a wider offering—de rigueur in the business today—Bombardier stands to lose orders for even its smaller planes. “What if Bombardier does nothing?” asks Canaccord Capital analyst Robert Fay. “If they do nothing, they're in trouble.”

Tellier, not long ago corporate Canada's most admired CEO, is today surely its least envied. His 18 months at Bombardier have already made his decade-long stint at CN look like a sinecure in comparison. That is saying a lot, considering the surgery he performed at CN. He essentially cut the work force in half and engineered the most successful privatization in Canadian history, raising $2.2 billion for the federal treasury. He bought two important U.S. railways, turning CN into a truly North American player. And he would have made it the continent's biggest railroad, and himself the industry's most powerful executive, had his planned 2000 merger with Burlington Northern Sante Fe not been stymied by U.S. regulators.

Tellier's accomplishments at CN were all the more impressive given the low expectations he faced when then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney appointed him CEO of the railway in 1992. Tellier, a native of Joliette, Que., a lawyer by training and an Oxford alumnus, had spent virtually his entire career in the federal bureaucracy. This earned him few friends or admirers on Bay Street, where the civil service was generally considered to be as bloated and inefficient as the railroad Tellier had been appointed to run. Besides, as deputy minister of energy in the Trudeau government, Tellier had overseen the creation of the hated National Energy Program. (Never mind that he helped unravel the same program for Mulroney's Conservatives.)

Had they looked more closely at his career in Ottawa, however, Tellier's early detractors would have been less dismissive. Under Mulroney, with whom he became friends, Tellier rose to become Clerk of the Privy Council, making him essentially CEO of the federal bureaucracy and the Prime Minister's deputy minister. He earned a reputation for his undying loyalty to Mulroney and, more important, for getting things done. He was not a popular leader, and was criticized from within his own ranks for failing to go to bat for the bureaucracy in the face of staffing cuts and ministerial buck-passing. He was, however, feared. As current CBC president and former Ottawa bureaucrat Robert Rabinovitch once put it, “Paul is at war, constantly at war. The way he thinks is war. He's not a strategic thinker, he's a tactician.” Added University of Ottawa management professor Gilles Paquet: “He's projecting a new, modern, mercenary view of the public service. The day the master changes, the man does not have to betray anything because his soul and heart were not there. He was simply selling his skills.”

Bay Street skepticism about his appointment at CN notwithstanding, the railway's Crown corporation status initially protected Tellier from market scrutiny. Says Canaccord's Fay: “He had a more measured pace at CN at which to learn the business than he's had at Bombardier. He also had time to literally handpick every one of his senior managers.” One of them, the CFO, was current BCE Inc. CEO Michael Sabia, another recruit from the Ottawa bureaucracy. Together, Tellier and Sabia prepared the railway for privatization by squeezing efficiencies out of every spike and making people afraid for their jobs.

While remaking CN in 1997, Tellier somehow found time to sit on the board of Bombardier at the beckoning of Laurent Beaudoin. As leaders of French Canada's corporate elite, Beaudoin and Tellier were natural brothers-in-arms. Both were passionate federalists. Tellier had piloted the unity file for both Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney, taking a leading role in the 1980 referendum campaign and the 1992 Charlottetown accord, a deal so close to Beaudoin's heart that he promoted it in the pay envelope of Canadair employees.

Tellier joined Bombardier's board during a boom. Or rather, the boom. In the late 1990s, Bombardier sprang from being a relatively minor aerospace player to become a market leader and the world's third-biggest manufacturer of civil aircraft, directly behind Boeing and Airbus. “Bombardier rode the biggest boom markets in the history of aerospace—business jets and regional jets,” says Richard Aboulafia, vice-president of Teal Group consultancy in Fairfax, Va. “To have access to both of these market explosions was an unprecedented opportunity beyond anything anyone could imagine.”

Of course, it took some foresight to cash in on this bonanza. The 1986 purchase of Canadair from the federal government laid the foundation for the creation of an aerospace superstar. Canadair had a single product—the Challenger business jet. Beaudoin and his then-lieutenant Bob Brown, another veteran of the federal bureaucracy, decided to adapt the plane for a new market. They oversaw the development of the Canadair Regional Jet (CRJ), the most innovative concept to hit air travel in years. A small jet to replace those noisy and languorous turboprops on short-haul, low-volume flights? Many in the industry doubted the economics could work. Bombardier proved them wrong, selling more than a thousand CRJs to airlines. The dot-com wave that created instant billionaires, meanwhile, fuelled demand for personal and corporate jets. Bombardier sold hundreds of its highly profitable Lears, Challengers and Global Expresses. Things were going so well that Brown was duly awarded the CEO's job in 1999. And Tellier, once Brown's boss in Ottawa, enthusiastically supported the appointment.

So did investors. Sure, they disliked Bombardier's opaque accounting and the dual-class share structure that gave the family 64% of the votes (since reduced to 58%) while it held barely 20% of the equity. But in a boom market, much is forgiven.

In the heady '90s, Bombardier's aerospace division was churning out new products faster than Martha Stewart was coming up with “good things.” A number of salubrious factors converged to make this possible: Ottawa was eager to cement the success of a Canadian-based multinational with loans and easy export financing on the sale of planes; development costs were relatively low, since the new planes were largely derivations of older planes; and hefty, recurring cash advances on Bombardier's train contracts helped cover R&D on the aerospace side.

By the end of the decade, however, Bombardier was flying into a cloud. It had stretched its 50-seat CRJ into 70- and 86-seat versions. To go any higher—say, to 100 seats—meant developing a brand-new plane. The cost of developing a new model—dubbed the BRJ-X—far outstripped that of any previous product and outsized all previous undertakings by the company.

Although they kept the mission top secret, Beaudoin and Brown even talked to Boeing and Airbus in the hopes of establishing a joint venture that would have allowed the BRJ-X to have a common cockpit with the bigger planes of either one of those manufacturers. That way, the Bombardier plane would have fit into a broader family of jets, making it more attractive to airlines who seek commonality in their fleets. Neither Boeing nor Airbus would bite.

The risk of the BRJ-X proved too great for Beaudoin and Brown to stomach. “We could not make the economics work on an airplane of 100 seats,” says one former executive who worked on the project. The BRJ-X died on the drawing board.

After terrorists struck the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, Bombardier lost the luxury of even contemplating a new plane. The airlines tanked, parking their planes in the desert as travellers stayed home. And the onetime dot-com billionaires, left holding penny stock in the wake of the boom, had already stopped making payments on their fancy jets. Bombardier chopped 3,800 workers and ended up becoming a used-plane dealer as much as a new jet builder. Cash became scarce.

The cash crunch was all the more severe because Bombardier had, earlier in 2001, paid about $1 billion too much to buy the train manufacturing unit of DaimlerChrysler, known as Adtranz. The deal made Bombardier the world's biggest maker of rolling stock, but the $3 billion in goodwill it came with would come back to haunt Beaudoin, who engineered the transaction. “Clearly the company was run by two people—Beaudoin and Brown—who both had their foot on the accelerator,” says analyst Fay. “When they started hitting potholes and running out of gas, they had nothing to fall back on.” Tellier is equally harsh: “What happened? Some people became obsessed with revenue growth. As a result, Bombardier developed 14 aircraft in 14 years—more than Boeing or Airbus. There is no way anybody can do that and do it perfectly. Indeed, we paid dearly for that. Dearly.”

Things were looking grim indeed in the summer of 2002. Still, no one expected the blow Brown delivered on Aug. 23, 2002: the first profit warning in Bombardier's history. Credibility is a CEO's first defence in tough times. And Brown, who had failed to deliver promised profits, had just lost his. The stock sank 22% that day. Brown, deservedly or not, was toast.

“ I was convinced we needed different leadership,” Beaudoin says of his decision to bag Brown, his former partner in business and gin rummy, that December. No executive search ensued. “My mind was made up,” Beaudoin says. “Mr. Tellier was on our board and I had known him for years. Besides, it would have been difficult for me to look at several candidates while Mr. Brown was still in place. I needed to be discreet. Mr. Brown became aware only when I informed him that I no longer required his services.”

The market, thrilled as it was with Tellier's appointment, largely overlooked the manner in which it was executed. It shouldn't have. Beaudoin's move to hire Tellier before even informing Bombardier's board should have been a reminder of how differently things operate in family-controlled companies compared with widely held ones, such as CN. “At Bombardier, Tellier's not 100% in control. There's someone looking over his shoulder,” points out Canaccord analyst Fay. “That in itself is a very big thing for Paul. Because people who are good leaders are used to making their own decisions.” The market, in its enthusiasm, also chose to ignore another factor: Tellier's utter lack of experience in the aerospace and rolling-stock businesses. “Tellier's been, for the last year and a half, on a learning exercise, finding out what these businesses are all about,” adds Fay. “And they're radically different from running a railroad and a lot more difficult.” In particular, both the transportation and aerospace sides of Bombardier are project-driven, requiring different skills than the ones that have made Tellier a name for himself.

It wasn't a steep learning curve that Tellier feared when he took the job. For a mind like his, that was likely one of the benefits. No, what gave him second thoughts about Beaudoin's offer was the realization that taking the job meant forgoing the opportunity to watch his grandkids grow up. But son Marc, now CEO of the Yellow Pages Group, gave a benediction. Tellier pre recalls: “‘Dad,' he said, ‘professionally this is a no-brainer. It's going to be fun.'”

Tellier gets animated as he recounts this story, slouching slightly in a comfy chair in a meeting room adjacent to his 30th-floor office on Ren-Lvesque Boulevard. His accented English betrays his French-Canadian roots, but the grey flannels and navy V-neck sweater indicate there's still a lot of the Oxford prep in Tellier. He has an angular, almost gaunt, face, a testimony to his religious dedication to fitness and a healthful diet. His endurance is legendary. He knew he would need it at Bombardier.

“ When Laurent came to me and said he felt very strongly that I was the guy who could do it, I said, ‘You know, this is going to be a hell of a challenge,'” he says, his voice rising and eyes widening. “But I thought it was worth doing....When we compare ourselves to our neighbours, let's face it, we've not been very successful in the manufacturing sector on a big scale. There is Nortel and Bombardier. This is an icon.” Besides, there was little left for Tellier to accomplish in the near term at CN. U.S. regulators had ensured that large-scale mergers were not in the cards. And, in Hunter Harrison, Tellier knew he had an able and ready successor. As a CN executive would tell Tellier, the time had come for him to “answer to a higher calling.”

Beaudoin and Tellier spoke extensively during the fall of 2002 as the decision to make the leap from CN jelled. The discussions helped raise Tellier's comfort level. Perhaps too much so. Given his stellar reputation at CN, he knew he would have to “manage down expectations—big time,” he says. That proved the least of his problems, however. When Tellier took over on Jan. 13, 2003, Bombardier, he discovered, was in far worse shape than he had realized. It was rapidly running out of cash. It was on the verge of breaching loan covenants that prohibited its net debt-to-capitalization ratio from exceeding 50%. Its banks were close to calling their loans. In short, Bombardier was having a near-death experience.

“ When I arrived, I expected my task was going to be to restructure the business, cut costs and improve productivity,” Tellier says. “But my first task ended up being very different from that ...I was thrown into discussions with the bankers. I was under enormous pressure to pull together a turnaround plan that would be acceptable to them and the credit rating agencies.” Bombardier's three banking syndicates—Canadian, European and American—had dozens of members. Tellier crisscrossed the Western world making his case to representatives of almost every one of them. “I decided it was important for my credibility, given the significance of the exercise, to do it personally. I led the discussions, instead of leaving it to Franois [LeMarchand, Bombardier's treasurer].”

As the revered CEO of CN, Tellier had made an awful lot of lenders, investment bankers and shareholders rich. It was time for them to return the favour. Not only did the bankers give him breathing room, he was able to raise $1.2 billion by issuing new stock—$400 million more than what he asked for.

The share issue was only one facet of a massive balance sheet makeover that Tellier announced in April, 2003, barely 2 1/2 months after taking over. The other elements included $2.2 billion in write-down, and the sale of Bombardier's recreational products division. None of those decisions—including an earlier one by Tellier to fire long-time CFO Louis Morin—were easy ones for Beaudoin to abide by. The stock sale diluted the family's controlling stake. The write-offs were an admission of past mistakes. And the sale of the Ski-Doo unit—the foundation on which the company had been built—was akin to pawning the crown jewels. (The unit, since renamed BRP, was sold in 2003 to Bain Capital and the Caisse de dpt et placement du Qubec. The family retains a 35% stake.)

Tellier admits he and Beaudoin engaged in “very healthy discussions” concerning the recapitalization plan. “I'm very impatient. So, very often, I would raise my voice and he would raise his voice, and so on,” he says euphemistically. “But you've got to understand: He built this company. He has visited every factory we own. He knows the business inside out. I mean, just imagine emotionally how he felt when I walked into his office and said, ‘Laurent, we've got to sell BRP.'

“ But when he offered me the job, I had said, ‘Laurent, it's a 100% mandate. I do the whole job.' And he agreed. Was it difficult for him to adjust to that? Very. Was it difficult for me to adjust to having a majority shareholder across the hall from my office? Very.”

Beaudoin does not deny that he had a hard time accepting Tellier's tough prescription. “It was not an easy decision for the family. It goes without saying that had we been able to, we would have preferred keeping the recreational products division within the company. But we supported Mr. Tellier.”

The family drew a line in the sand soon after, however, when Tellier mused publicly about eliminating Bombardier's dual-class share structure in favour of a one-share, one-vote regime. This was part of Tellier's broader plan to improve Bombardier's governance—and, hence, its credibility with investors—and pave the way for a listing on the New York Stock Exchange. But Beaudoin and vice-chairman Jean-Louis Fontaine, another Bombardier lifer who had married into the family, went ballistic. In their eyes, Tellier had overstepped his mandate. Changing Bombardier's share structure is simply not on the table. “We've taken a very clear position on that,” Beaudoin states. Adds Tellier: “The decision was taken. I abide by the decision.”

So much for the 100% mandate. Beaudoin's overruling of his CEO was hardly a comforting signal for investors. Nor was Beaudoin's decision to rehire Louis Morin, the CFO Tellier had sacked, a few months later at BRP.

Tellier had no time to worry about such slights. He had to choose his battles and he chose astutely, attacking Bombardier's internal culture. “Simplicity is not a quality Bombardier has,” he says. “We have far more complicators than simplifiers. This is true in our accounting and in many of our other processes. I'm trying to change that. When someone is convoluted, I say, ‘Come to the point.' I've cut down on these endless PowerPoint presentations. When someone is to give a presentation I insist on getting it in advance, so I can review it. That way, I can cut them off and say, ‘I don't have anything to discuss in the first 38 pages, so let's start at page 39.'”

Adjusting to the Tellier era was hard for Pierre Lortie, the head of Bombardier Transportation, the Berlin-based rail unit. Tellier fired him in November and undertook to personally impose a severe crash diet on the division. “When I started to see the numbers sliding in the wrong direction at Transportation, I had discussions back and forth with the leadership there for three or four months, but there was no change. Therefore, I came to the conclusion that I would have no choice but to roll up my sleeves and do the job myself,” Tellier recounts. “The board was concerned about this. They said, ‘Paul, you're going to kill yourself. You've got a full-time job at head office.'”

It's easy to understand the board's worries. For more than three months, until last March, Tellier's weekly routine consisted of this: He left Montreal at 8 a.m. Sunday, aboard a company Challenger or Global Express, for the eight-hour flight to Berlin, arriving at 10 p.m. local time. He spent two days in the office there, and then caught his return flight to Montreal at 6 p.m., arriving at home just in time for dinner. On the way over, Tellier pored over briefing binders on the sorry state of the rail unit. On the way back, he opened a second briefcase containing head-office business. Tellier looked forward to Tuesdays. They were especially productive because he gained an additional six hours on the flight back to Montreal. He had, in effect, discovered the 30-hour day. “He is the best manager of time I have ever seen,” says Moya Greene, a former Transport Canada bureaucrat and CIBC executive whom Tellier brought on board last fall as senior vice-president of operational effectiveness.

On the weekly treks to and from Berlin, Tellier imposed a strict code of silence in the first cabin of the Global Express. Blabbers were relegated to the back. Tellier would raise his eyes from his briefing books only occasionally, to study the geography below. Greene marvels at Tellier's discipline, which includes knowing when to take a break. The same keen sensitivity to physical well-being is evident in his diet. Those pastry platters that hotels all too often provide in meeting rooms don't suit him. “Paul needs his protein,” Greene laughs.

Tellier prescribed the same low-carb fix for Bombardier's bloated rail unit. In mid-March, he announced the closure of seven European plants, 6,600 job cuts and $777 million in restructuring charges over three years. Investors hoped that would be the end of it. But in May, Bombardier stunned them again with a $174-million (U.S.) first-quarter loss (the company recently switched to reporting in U.S. currency) on the heels of $200 million worth of “contract adjustments” at the rail division. Investors, weary of bad news, threw up their hands, knocking down the stock 20%. Tellier offers this explanation: “Look, the new guy [rail division president Andr Navarri] comes in. He knows the business better than I ever will and he says, ‘I think the other guys were overly optimistic.'”

Tellier promises, however, no more nasty surprises at the train unit. But that does not mean the division is back on the rails, either. The mass transit business is changing. Not long ago, it was a sleepy industry where public-sector agencies and their governments could be counted on not only to pay the asking price but also to cough up generous cash advances without a stitch of work being done. Indeed, Bombardier had about $2.5 billion (U.S.) in advances on its balance sheet at April 30.

Such advancesÊhaveÊtraditionally been an important source ofÊfunds for the company. But they're likely to dwindle rapidly in coming quarters, first because customers are increasinglyÊreluctant to provide them and second, because Tellier's vowÊto be disciplined on pricing meansÊBombardier could end up losing more bidding wars with its competitors than it wins. Such is theÊCatch-22 facing the rail unit: Either hold steady on pricing and risk losing out on contracts, or bid aggressively for business butÊsqueeze already minuscule margins in the process.

Still,Êthe train unit probably offers more promise for stability thanÊBombardier's aerospace division. Tellier concedes that much of the latter's fate isÊbeyond hisÊcontrol. “Only a fool would argue that there are no external factors that could affect us,” he says. Indeed, all but a handful of airlines remain fragile financially. It would take little—an extended Orange Alert in the U.S., for example—to ground several of them for good. Bombardier's order book—down to $11 billion worth of planes from twice that a few years ago—is sparse, and getting sparser. In July, troubled US Airways deferred delivery of 19 CRJs it had ordered. Analysts worry that more cancellations might follow.

This, alas, is the context in which Tellier must decide whether to build a new plane. Current market conditions might be bleak, but manufacturers must look far into the future, anticipate demand and be ready with new, ever more efficient planes when the airlines finally get cleared—by their creditors, in many cases—for takeoff. That may come tomorrow. Or it may never come, at least not for the type of plane Bombardier could build.

Tellier has been publicly insisting since his appointment that Bombardier does not need to expand its product line. But within Bombardier, he has had to face mounting discontent from his engineers, who are dying to design a new plane. Outside the company, he has faced growing criticism for taking what, until recently, looked like an ostrich's approach toward Embraer's success. In June, 2003, New York-based JetBlue—the discount airline widely considered a model for the industry—ordered 100 of Embraer's E190s for $3 billion (U.S.). Air Canada followed in December with a $1.35-billion (Canadian) order for 45 of the Embraer 100-seaters. That order is widely expected to grow to 60 planes, at Bombardier's expense, as Air Canada cancels 15 of the 45 CRJs it has on order and replaces them with E190s—that is, if the airline exits court protection as scheduled on Sept. 30.

The Air Canada-Embraer deal appears to have been a turning point for Tellier. Behind the scenes in January, Bombardier hired a headhunter. Its mission: to find a seasoned aerospace executive who could pilot Bombardier's entry into the 100-plus-seat market. In the end, Bombardier did not have to look very far. Before joining Bombardier in March, Gary Scott, 53, had been working for the previous 20 months at the Montreal operations of flight simulator maker CAE Inc. Before that, he had spent 28 years at Boeing in Seattle, a stint that included overseeing the aircraft maker's hugely successful 737 platform.

Scott came to CAE as the likely replacement for retiring CEO Derek Burney. When Bombardier came calling, he faced what other people might have considered a tough choice. Not Scott. “Even Derek said, ‘How can you give up an opportunity to be CEO?' But if you're in the aerospace business, there's nothing bigger and more enticing than launching a new airplane program. It just sort of trumps every other opportunity.” (And the top job at CAE? That went to Bob Brown.)

Bolstered by a $35-million (U.S.) budget and a team of 165—which will grow to 250 over the next year—Scott's mandate is to make the business case for (or against) a new family of jets. Already, he's ruled out going up directly against Embraer's 100-seat E190. Bombardier's three-plane family, tentatively dubbed the C Series, would cover the span from 110 seats to 135 seats—a market Scott puts at $250 billion (U.S.) over two decades. The series, targeted for takeoff in 2010, would land smack dab in Airbus and Boeing territory. The key to Bombardier's success, therefore, lies in its ability to build a plane that is more efficient (by at least 15%, in Tellier's reckoning) than those offered by Boeing or Airbus.

That is a costly proposition—a start-up outlay of at least $2 billion. A big portion of that would be eaten up by the R&D effort to come up with the lighter composite materials that will create a significantly more fuel-efficient plane. Bombardier's pockets are far too shallow to finance such an endeavour on its own. It will have a hard enough time coming up with its proposed one-third share, as investors cringe at the prospect of another dilutive equity issue. The company is counting on governments and risk-sharing suppliers to come up with the other two-thirds.

On the first front, Scott made his case to deputy ministers in Ottawa this spring. The ultimate decision lies with Prime Minister Paul Martin. But Bombardier is not counting only its Canadian chickens. It's also talking to decision-makers in Northern Ireland, where its Short Brothers unit already builds fuselages for the CRJ, and to state governments south of the border. It hopes to provoke a bidding war among jurisdictions for the high-quality jobs that would come with building airplanes.

The response from engine makers, meanwhile, has been keen, Scott says. U.S.-based Pratt & Whitney and Britain's Rolls-Royce will work together on a proposal through their IAE partnership, while General Electric and France's Snecma will collaborate on a submission through their CFMI joint venture.

Scott describes the C Series as “kind of like Apollo 13. Failure is not an option.” It is an awkward comparison. Apollo 13 was a heroic space odyssey—overcoming an explosion in one of its oxygen tanks—but did not fulfill its mission of a moon landing. Bombardier could use a better simile. Indeed, aerospace consultant Richard Aboulafia, for one, is “very doubtful” Bombardier's C Series will fly. “I'm not really sure what Bombardier could do for this market that Boeing or Airbus haven't already done,” says Aboulafia, who briefed Industry Canada officials on market trends in March. “Sure, everybody says they're going to be 15% to 20% more efficient. But it's hard to imagine anything technologically that would allow Bombardier to beat the [Boeing] B737 or [Airbus] A320.” Those planes are generally configured to seat many more passengers (up to 180) than the C Series proposes to carry. But those bigger planes are more costly to run, and not economical for the passenger loads Bombardier is aiming at. As for the Boeing and Airbus offerings in the 100-to-135-seat category, Scott brands them as duds: either too big or too heavy, or too limited in range, to go head-to-head with Bombardier's proposed jet.

But then, either cash-rich Boeing or government-supported Airbus, or both of them, could react to a threat from Bombardier by plowing resources into developing better 100-to-135-seat planes or discounting their existing models deeply enough to make them irresistible to cash-poor airlines. “Of course, Boeing and Airbus have the means to compete against us,” Beaudoin replies. “But I don't think that [100-to-135-seat] market is a priority for them right now.” Boeing is focusing on launching its 7E7, or so-called dreamliner, while Airbus has its hands full developing its A380 super-jumbo jet.

Still, there are those in the aerospace industry who think all Bombardier's C-Series talk is simply a ploy to provoke either Boeing or Airbus into a marriage of convenience. Bombardier, after all, previously tried to strike a deal with those manufacturers when it contemplated launching the BRJ-X. An Alliance would forfend, on one front, anyway, the sort of subsidy wars that Boeing has waged with Airbus (and Embraer with Bombardier). Tellier, Beaudoin and Scott all concede they would be interested in talking to them again.

" Our mindset is not to exclude any reasonable, possible option," Tellier says. "What kind of partnership could take place with another aircraft manufacturer? It could be project specific. It could be a joint venture. It could be an equity position. It could take several forms." It's easy to understand the appeal of such a partnership for Bombardier. It would neutralize a powerful competitor. It would cut the risks associated with the C Series. And it would improve the sales prospects for Bombardier's plane by making it compatible with the jet families of one of the bigger players. Boeing is the most likely partner for Bombardier , given Airbus's indirect collaboration with Embraer on military contracts. But in June, Allan Mulally, Boeing's head of commercial aircraft, said he wasn't interested in a deal with Bombardier.

The latter, however, isn't yet taking no for an answer. It can't afford to. If the C Series is ever to get off the ground , and Bombardier to get out of the hole it's been in since 9/11, it must undergo a far more radical metamorphosis than the one Tellier has thus far imposed. It could mean splitting the company in two -- rail and aerospace -- and selling all or part of the plane unit to Boeing. Certainly, 6% operating margins, the only objective Tellier has publicly set for himself, won't be enough to placate investors.

Whatever end his changes produce, Tellier may not be there to see it. It's not been an easy time for the Easy Rider. Even his stamina has its limits, after all. He is halfway through a three-year contract, one that can be extended for two years, although he refers to fiscal 2006as the culmination of three-year reorganization. "I want to turn it around," he says. "Well, I want to make sure the turning is well underway, if not completed.

But let's face it. We're talking about changing the culture and it takes time to do that. My successor, whoever he or she is, is going to have a job cut out for them.” The shakeup at the Bomber has but begun.