Canadian firm sues AeroTEC, Mitsubishi
File photo The Mitsubishi Aircraft Corp. MRJ-90 No. 1 touches down at the Grant County International Airport in 2016. A Canadian company alleges that Mitsubishi and AeroTEC illegally used proprietary information in getting the MRJ certified.
MOSES LAKE — Canadian aerospace firm Bombardier is accusing Mitsubishi Aircraft and Seattle-based testing and certification company AeroTEC of stealing Bombardier’s trade secrets and illegally using them to help obtain certification of the Mitsubishi Regional Jet (MRJ), currently being tested in Moses Lake.
In a 92-page lawsuit filed with the U.S. Federal Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle last Friday, Montreal-based Bombardier accused the two companies and five named individuals — all former Bombardier employees now working for Mitsubishi or AeroTEC — of “trade secret misappropriation” by sharing proprietary Bombardier documents with Mitsubishi and AeroTEC in violation of U.S. and Washington state law.
“The information contained in these documents would be invaluable to anyone involved in an effort to certify aircraft for entry into service,” attorneys for Bombardier wrote. “(T)hey provide tremendous insight as to the quality, quantity, and type of information an aircraft manufacturer needs to provide to any particular regulatory agency to obtain certification.”
In a statement issued to the press, Mitsubishi Aircraft said it sees the lawsuit as a vindication of its MRJ program.
“(We) see these proceedings as a recognition of our competitive product and this lawsuit primarily as an attempt by Bombardier to stifle global competition,” the company said.
“We will strongly defend our position in this case,” Mitsubishi added.
AeroTEC did not respond to requests from the Columbia Basin Herald for comment.
In addition to Mitsubishi and AeroTEC, also named in the suit are current AeroTEC employees Michel Korwin-Szymanowski, Laurus Basson, Marc-Antoine Delarche and Cindy Dorneval, as well as Mitsubishi employee Keith Ayres, who currently lives in Nagoya, Japan.
All worked for Bombardier and all are accused of emailing or attempting to email Bombardier documents relating to various aspects of certification of the company’s C Series passenger jets (now known as the Airbus A220), a 100-130 passenger medium-range jetliner the MRJ would directly compete with.
In its filing, Bombardier describes a complex and almost Byzantine process for certifying aircraft that is highly dependent on proprietary information and intricate discussions between manufacturers and regulators, and suggested Mitsubishi embarked on the MRJ program without knowing what it would take to get the plane commercially certified.
“Even the applicable regulations for which Bombardier tested compliance are not readily attainable, because those particular regulations applicable to a specific system are a subset of countless regulations relating to commercial aircraft certification, and they are identified only after an aircraft manufacturer meets in confidence with certifying authority representatives (often through the course of several meetings) to reach agreement on which specific subset of regulations must be satisfied,” Bombardier’s lawyers wrote.
Bombardier alleges the documents illicitly given to AeroTEC and Mitsubishi include things like pre-flight and post-flight checklists, in-flight test profiles, and testing parameters for specific systems, such as smoke detectors.
“This information would be invaluable to anyone involved in an effort to obtain certificates of airworthiness,” Bombardier’s lawyers wrote. “(N)ot least because it would give the reader flight streamlined testing parameters and configurations to prove that the aircraft meets the certified design criteria without having to arrive at those parameters and configurations independently or having to conduct needless, increasingly costly additional flight testing.”
Bombardier also accuses both Mitsubishi and AeroTEC of being overly aggressive in recruiting its employees, especially after the fourth delay announcement in the MRJ program in December 2015.
The company is asking the court to prohibit Mitsubishi and AeroTEC from further use of any proprietary information “misappropriated by any former Bombardier personnel” and to block the two companies from hiring any more Bombardier employees “for the improper purpose of obtaining” Bombardier trade secrets.
Bombardier is also seeking unspecified punitive damages and “any other relief as deemed appropriate by this court.”
Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com.