AirAsia is set to place the largest single order in the history of the Airbus A220 program — up to 150 jets — in a multibillion-dollar deal to be announced Wednesday at Airbus‘s Mirabel, Quebec assembly facility, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.
Prime Minister Mark Carney and Quebec Premier Christine Fréchette are expected to attend, alongside union leaders and local officials. Export Development Canada is expected to help finance the aircraft.
The deal is AirAsia’s first purchase of the type. The Malaysian low-cost carrier operates an all-Airbus fleet of roughly 250 narrowbody aircraft, almost entirely A320-family jets. Capital A co-founder Tony Fernandes traveled to Canada to finalize the agreement.
The A220, which seats between 110 and 149 passengers, would let AirAsia serve thinner Southeast Asian routes where the A320 carries too many seats to be economical.
“We want to go to places where the A320 is just too big,” Fernandes has said.
For Airbus, the order is a critical lifeline. The A220 traces its origins to Bombardier‘s CSeries program, which Airbus acquired essentially for free in 2018 after the Canadian planemaker neared financial collapse. The program has yet to turn a profit.
Airbus currently builds seven to eight A220s per month across Mirabel and its Mobile, Alabama facility — well below the 14 per month needed to break even, with a revised 2026 target of 12. Embraer’s E2 family outsold the A220 three-to-one last year, capped by a March win with Finnair that exposed the program’s commercial vulnerability.
“This new order puts the program on the path to profit,” said Ernest Arvai of US aerospace consultancy AirInsight. “It certainly gets it much closer to the break-even point, and it gives the airplane some additional market momentum.”
The order also has some political weight for Carney, whose government has made doubling non-US exports within the decade a central trade policy goal. Canada’s aerospace sector has so far sidestepped Washington’s tariff fallout — aerospace imports remain exempt — preserving the cross-border supply chains the A220 depends on.
Bombardier once pitched a 160-seat high-density version of the CSeries to AirAsia. The airline passed. Since Airbus rebranded it the A220, the program has accumulated 949 orders from 32 customers, including Delta Airlines and JetBlue.
Quebec, which holds a 25% stake after investing US$1 billion to keep Bombardier solvent, owns the remainder alongside Airbus’s 75%.
AirAsia has faced severe fuel cost pressure from the US-Israeli war with Iran. The airline carries no fuel hedges, and its stock has shed nearly 40% of its value since the conflict began. The A220’s Pratt & Whitney PW1500G engines offer meaningfully lower per-seat operating costs — a direct answer to the airline’s margin squeeze on thinner routes.
Neither Airbus nor AirAsia had issued a formal statement as of publication. Sources caution the announcement could still be modified.
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