Ready to take off again?
PASS through the gates of the Bombardier plant in Querétaro and you leave the Mexico of potholed roads and blaring horns behind: welcome to a strangely serene place called North America.
In the car park neat lines of vehicles all face the same way—almost unthinkable elsewhere in Mexico. The factory is run by a woman—ditto. Enter the building where the cockpit, fuselage and tail section of Bombardier’s new eight-seat Learjet 85 business jet are being made and it looks more like a laboratory than a factory.
Technicians with face masks work behind glass in a dust-free room. Instead of metal, layers of carbon fibre cut by laser are moulded and baked in a giant oven to make a seamless fuselage (pictured). There are no pungent, oily smells, no urgent, whining drills, no soul-stirring hammering. It would be the dullest factory visit your correspondent has ever made—were it not for what it says about the future of North America.
With the exception of the wings, which are made in Northern Ireland, the Learjet 85 is a North American story. Bombardier, a Canadian firm based in Montreal, took over Learjet, an American firm, in 1990. When...