Bombardier Challenger 600 series
business jet family by Canadair, later Bombardier
The Bombardier Challenger 600 series is a family of business jets developed by Canadair after a Bill Lear concept, and then produced from 1986 by its new owner, Bombardier Aerospace.
At the end of 1975, Canadair began funding the development of LearStar 600, and then bought the design for a wide-cabin business jet in April 1976.
On 29 October, the programme was launched, backed by the Canadian federal government, and designed to comply with new FAR part 25 standards.
In March 1977, it was renamed the Challenger 600 after Bill Lear was phased out, and the original conventional tail was changed for a T-tail among other developments.
The first prototype was rolled out on 25 May 1978, and performed its maiden flight on 8 November.
The flight test program saw a deadly crash on 3 April 1980, but Transport Canada approved the CL-600 type certification on 10 August 1980.
In 1986, Canadair was close to bankruptcy and was bought by Bombardier.
The jet was later stretched into the Bombardier CRJ regional airliner, introduced on 19 October 1992, and the longer range Global Express, introduced in July 1999.
The 500th Challenger was rolled out in May 2000, and the 1000th was delivered to NetJets in December 2015.
By October 2018, 1,066 aircraft had been built.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Bombardier Challenger 600 series” as business jet family by Canadair, later Bombardier. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as business jet family by Canadair, later Bombardier. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q699843. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1986, 1975, 1976 and 1977.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bombardier Challenger 600 series” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.