Bombardier is offloading its slow-selling Q400 turboprop passenger plane line to Viking Air, it announced Thursday, in another step away from the airliner business after the handover of a majority stake in its budget-busting CSeries program to Airbus this summer. The plane and train maker is also selling its business jet training program to partner CAE and cutting 5,000 jobs in a restructuring initiative.

The Montreal-based company said in its third-quarter earnings release that it expected to book net proceeds of US$250 million from the sale of the Q400 line and the type certificates and IP for smaller versions of the twin turboprop plane to Viking Air parent Longview Capital, which has built a business on planes it has acquired from Bombardier that were developed by the defunct Canadian plane maker de Havilland. Bombardier bought Q Series maker de Havilland from Boeing in 1992.

A sale of the Q400 line was considered likely after Bombardier announced a deal in May to sell the factory where the Q400 is built in Toronto for US$635 million, another move by CEO Alain Bellemare to raise cash as he's worked to pull the debt-burdened company out of the financial crater it dug in its costly effort to compete with Airbus and Boeing at the lower end of the airliner market by developing the CSeries.

Bombardier said it would continue to explore strategic options for its remaining commercial aircraft line, the CRJ regional jets, while seeking to return it to profitability.

There's healthy demand for regional aircraft amid a boom in air travel worldwide-Forecast International projects that 6,086 regional aircraft will be produced in the 15-year period from 2018 through 2032-but Bombardier's ability to compete in the segment has slipped.

Bombardier pioneered the regional jet market in the 1990s with the CRJ, a stretched version of its Challenger business jet, but the aging airframe has been outsold in recent years by Embraer's newer E jets. The Q400 is a higher-performance turboprop than competitor ATR's, but observers say many regional airlines haven't seen a need for its capabilities at the correspondingly higher price. Forecast International expects the CRJ and Q400 to be a distant fourth in the regional aircraft market with 503 sales over the next 15 years, behind Embraer with projected sales of 1,519 regional jets, and ATR with 1,207 turboprops.

Bombardier said it expects to book net proceeds of US$650 million from its deal with CAE to sell its business aircraft training program, which includes a US$155 million discounted prepayment by CAE for 20 years' worth of future royalties to Bombardier on the program.

For the third quarter, Bombardier reported net income of US$149 million on sales of US$3.6 billion, its third straight quarterly profit after 10 quarters in the red.

Bombardier said it's moving more engineers into its business aircraft division, which has become the core of the company's future as it retreats from commercial aviation.

Through 2020, Bombardier expects overall sales to rise 25% to US$20 billion, with the business-jet division accounting for three quarters of the growth.

The company said it expects sales to rise 10% in 2019 to US$18 billion or more as it ramps up production of its recently certified Global 7500 business jet.

However lower guidance for cash flow spooked investors. The company is now saying it will include the proceeds of the Toronto land sale to meet its breakeven forecast for the year, and that it will only break even on cash flow in 2019.

Bombardier's B shares plunged 24.5% to 2.41 Thursday on the Toronto Stock Exchange.