Bombardier Defense

Bombardier Defense is the defence arm of Bombardier Inc., and its business is narrower than the parent's. It takes the Global and Challenger business jet families, aircraft designed for long range and high cruise altitude, and turns them into platforms for missions that used to require converted airliners or ageing turboprops. The advanced aircraft portfolio is the starting point. Challenger 3500 and Challenger 650 cover the medium segment, with the 650 favoured for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance work, maritime patrol and medical evacuation. Global 5500, Global 6500 and Global 8000 cover the long-range end, where the 6500 has become the reference airframe for demanding special mission fits thanks to more than eighteen hours of endurance and maintenance intervals stretching to 750 flight hours.

Specialised mission solutions is the engineering half. Bombardier Defense designs, builds, tests and certifies the structural provisions, antenna farms, power and cooling that mission integrators need, then hands over aircraft ready for sensor installation. Green aircraft delivery, where Bombardier supplies a flight-ready airframe with provisions already built in and the customer's chosen integrator fits the sensors afterward, is the model behind most of these programs. Much of that work is done at its Wichita site, where the first flight of the modified Global 6000 for Germany's PEGASIS signals intelligence program took place in 2024. The customer list runs through the major airborne intelligence programs of the past decade. The United States Air Force flies the E-11A Battlefield Airborne Communications Node on Global airframes, a fleet under a multi-year arrangement approaching US$465 million in potential value. The United States Army chose the Global 6500 for its High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System, with Sierra Nevada Corporation as integrator under a near billion dollar award, and bridges to it with the ATHENA aircraft already flying operational missions in the Pacific. Saab mounts its Erieye extended range radar on the Global 6000 and 6500 to make GlobalEye.

Services and support is the third piece, sold as Smart Services Defense and delivered through a worldwide maintenance network, parts procurement, aircraft enhancement and configuration work, and training. A pre-owned aircraft business sells and manages used Global and Challenger airframes into government fleets, which is often how smaller air forces enter the family. Bombardier Defense counts more than 170 operators in over 50 countries. At home, Canada ordered six Global 6500s in December 2025 for about C$753 million to replace the CC-144 Challenger fleet on utility, aeromedical and national security flights, and Bombardier has offered a Global 6500 anti-submarine and multi-mission aircraft with General Dynamics Mission Systems-Canada for the Canadian Multi-Mission Aircraft requirement. The unit reports into Bombardier Inc. in Montreal and is not separately listed.