Qatar Airways makes its Canadian debut on June 29 when it launches three weekly flights to Montreal -and the Doha-based airline sounds increasingly certain it will provide the city another boost around the same time. That would come in the form of finalizing, at long last, the rollercoaster purchase talks for a raft of CSeries aircraft. Qatar Airways president Akbar AlBaker has hinted that the announcement would come in late June at the Paris air show, after much wrangling for more than 18 months over various issues.
SVP for the Americas, Dudley Snyder, called the CSeries "far more appealing" than the alternative Airbus 320neo. "When we look at the [A320] neo, it is an incremental development of an existing aircraft at the lowest possible cost because they simply don’t have the R&D funds." He told reporters over the weekend.
There are also confirmed hints at Qatar that they are looking very seriously at a 49% stake in Virgin Atlantic to pump up their traffic flow into the existing global network. They seem to be confident that they are in with a real shot at completing the deal or else they would not mention the same. All this of course depends on Qatar not being caught up in the political turmoil sweeping across the MENA region.