Honda Jet's strange looking aircraft aces first flight

The upstart ailine manufacturer is moving ahead with a product and a plan that sounds oddly familiar

Fans of Mad Men know that when Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce started their new advertising agency the thing they wanted most was an airline. Had they not insulted, and then kicked out, Honda (at that time a motorized bike company) due to Roger’s WWII Pacific Theater rage, they would now have one. Yes, Honda is an airline manufacturer. What began formally at Honda in 2006 after 20 years of research and development on the side, has now come to the point where Honda has four aircraft for testing.

See if this sounds familiar. Honda’s product will be:
- Smaller than its competition
- More fuel efficient than other similar products
- Quieter than the current products in the market
- Uses "outside the box the thinking" with regard to engines
- No threat to anyone, just quietly making a small non-threatening little product…

By all measures Honda is following its playbook from the motorcycle, automotive and residential power products success to enter the airplane business.

This is Honda’s third flying aircraft, as one is used for ground based testing. Previous flights tested the performance envelope, flying to 43,000 feet and achieving a speed of 420 KTAS (knots True Airspeed – just think miles per hour). This flight seems to have been more a test of the aircraft in a regional jet scenario. The pilots flew to 11,500 feet and kept the speed in the cruising speed range for about 74 minutes (the time it takes to fly from Boston to New York perhaps?). Stefan Johansson, pilot-in-command was quoted as saying “The stick shift is probably the best in the world. When the engine switches cam lobes at about 5,000 RPM, and the V-TEC system kicks in, this baby really scoots.” (No of course he didn’t say that!) However, Michimasa Fujino, President and CEO of Honda Aircraft Company did say in a press statement "The first flight of F3 shows the steady advancement on our course toward delivering to our customers an aircraft that offers not only superior performance, efficiency and comfort, but also superior quality,"

If history is any guide, it will not be long before business people taking regional flights become used to seeing the yellow planes with the engines mounted up and back from the wings.

Source;
http://www.torquenews.com/1083/honda-jets-third-aircraft-aces-first-fligh

Honda out to shake up market with 1st jet next year

* Honda sees minimum 25% share of small business jet market
* HondaJet aims to be the Civic of small business jets -exec
* HondaJet to up ante on Cessna, Embraer
* Sees demand for small jets growing as users downsize -exec
* Wants to enter Brazil, China earlier than planned

By Chang-Ran Kim
TOKYO, Jan 30 (Reuters) - Honda Motor Co expects to grab at least a quarter of the world market for small business jets soon after delivering its first aircraft next year, achieving the company's long-standing goal of taking to the skies, an executive said.

Honda, Japan's No.3 car maker and the world's biggest manufacturer of motorcycles and engines, is in the final stages of getting its $4.5 million HondaJet certified. It aims to ramp up the pace of production to 80 a year in the first half of 2013.

Honda received more than 100 orders for the seven-seater jet in three days when it began taking orders in 2006, promising a quieter engine, 20 percent better fuel economy over competing models and operational costs of two-thirds or less.

It has not disclosed an updated number of orders, but Michimasa Fujino, a Honda executive and CEO of its North Carolina-based subsidiary, Honda Aircraft Company, said it held a backlog of about three years from orders taken through its nine dealerships in North America and Europe.

"I'm very optimistic about our prospects," Fujino, who initiated Honda's foray into aviation research in 1986, told a small group of reporters at the automaker's Tokyo headquarters on Monday.

"We're doing with HondaJet what the Civic did to American cars from the 1960s. Our competitors are still producing with technology from the 1990s," he said, referring to Textron Inc's Cessna and Brazil's Embraer SA, which now dominate the 200-a-year small business jet market.

The Civic, known for its reliability, durability and mileage, has consistently been among the United States' best-selling cars since its launch in 1973, forcing industry giants such as General Motors Co to follow suit with cars to meet the country's tighter emissions regulations.

Honda's ambition of making jets traces back to its iconic founder, Soichiro Honda. The HondaJet will make Honda the only car maker in the world to build its own aircraft.

Its engine is made by a joint venture between Honda and General Electric Co.

Honda Aircraft is aiming to turn a profit by 2018, Fujino said.

BRAZIL, CHINA CLAMOURING FOR JETS
The business jet industry is expecting a rebound in sales this year after the global economic crisis hammered sales over the past three years.

While the small business jet market has traditionally been limited to North America and Europe so far, Fujino said he was fielding about a call a week from China, both from prospective buyers and eager dealers, while interest was also greater than he anticipated in Brazil, India and the Middle East.

"Right now we want to focus on delivering on the orders that we have, but I'd like to enter Brazil and China earlier than we'd initially planned," he said, declining to specify a timeframe. New demand from emerging markets could expand the global small-jet market to about 300 a year, he said.

Fujino said he was also seeing more interest in the smallest end of the market as medium-sized jet users look to downsize to get more for their fuel, much like the trend in the car industry.
"Most of our customers are owners of small- and medium-sized businesses, and many are looking to get the most out of the jets that they need," he said.

With operational costs of about $1,000-$1,200 an hour, HondaJet could make travelling in a group of five or six cheaper and more efficient than flying commercially between small cities, he said. Competitors offer at best $1,800 by comparison, he added.

Honda Aircraft will add 300-350 factory staff to bring its total workforce to around 1,000 in the first half of 2013, Fujino said.

Source;
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/30/honda-jet-idUSL4E8CU1TM20120130

HondaJet Likely To Be First Of A Family

By George C. LarsonGreensboro, N.C.

As Honda Aircraft begins its sixth year, it is advancing cautiously but relentlessly toward the 2012 scheduled certification of its $4.5 million HA-420 HondaJet.

One pacing item for the airplane’s overall approval is its turbofan engine, the HF-120. A product of GE Honda Aero Engines, the powerplant, equipped with a full authority digital engine control (Fadec), first ran in 2009 and became available for testing on a conformal aircraft for the first time in 2010. Its developers report “steady progress” and expect to receive FAA certification of the 2,095-lb.-thrust engine by year-end.

Although the aircraft program has been delayed by more than a year, the Honda organization appears to be unhurried—paced, no doubt, by the precipitous drop in the global economy and subsequent fall-off in light-jet sales. Meanwhile, it continues to be guarded about the precise health of the order book, which has stood at “over 100” for years now.

The company says aircraft testing has proceeded on schedule, and the conformal aircraft, which first flew in December 2010, recently surpassed its specified 420-kt. true airspeed with a flight to 425 kt. Five aircraft are to be involved in the certification trials.

In an industry familiar with failed startups, a visit to Honda Aircraft’s Greensboro, N.C., headquarters at Piedmont Triad International Airport makes clear very quickly that one of the world’s largest automakers is in the aircraft business for the long haul. The tidy campus, and the offices and workspaces contained therein, are austere and functional, in keeping with the company’s culture. But the amount of investment in evidence and 263,000-sq.-ft. production facility leaves no doubt that Honda is looking beyond this first light jet and toward follow-on products.

CEO Mishimasa Fujino only hints at that scenario, saying, “We cannot sustain a company with one product.” Future models might not feature the HondaJet’s unique engine-over-wing design, he has said, but would likely incorporate concepts that are equally innovative.

The company could have reduced the amount of its bet by outsourcing much of the testing and research on both its original proof-of-concept aircraft and the production conforming models in FAA certification testing now. But Honda decided to do it all in-house, and has not scrimped in the process.

One employee estimates the total investment in buildings and equipment at roughly $100 million, but that seems low. On campus are complete full-scale structural test rigs equipped with dozens of computer-controlled actuators, an advanced system-integration test facility that “flies” a virtually complete airplane as represented by its principal systems, and a fully staffed telemetry facility that can capture 2,500 data streams.

This is not to say that Honda is not availing itself of numerous suppliers from all over the world.

The plant as configured now is planned around assembly of finished components, not ab initio manufacture. Just one example: Hampson Aerospace of Grand Prairie, Texas, a subsidiary of a parent company in the U.K., will provide completed empennage assemblies. And more: GKN Aerospace, a composites fabricator in Tallassee, Ala., supplies fuselage components. Avcorp, a subcontractor in British Columbia, will supply parts of the wing. Garmin’s G3000 avionics will light up the panel.

Aircraft will follow two parallel paths and emerge from the now completed final assembly facility, empty for the moment, then undergo systems installation, completion and painting at Greensboro.

Fujino expresses satisfaction with the Carolina workers, citing “good quality” and “a strong work ethic.”

The workforce is young—tablet notebooks are everywhere—with some notable experienced heads such as Mark Ard, vice president of engineering and a former Gulfstream executive, in key management slots. Fujino notes that just four years ago the company had 40 employees; now the figure is 600-700, with another 200-300 expected in 2012 when production gets under way in earnest.

The light jet’s legend started as Fujino’s vision and a cursory sketch in 1997. The unconventional engine arrangement employing overwing mounting is said to save room in the fuselage for a total of 66 cu. ft. of baggage (9 cu. ft. in a forward compartment and 57 aft of the cabin; it’s not accessible in flight). The combination of drag-reducing natural laminar flow over the wing’s advanced airfoil and the unusually shaped bulbous nose are what Honda says provides up to 30% gains in efficiency over the competition. Efficiency may sell on paper, but Honda appears to be placing more of its marketing bet on cabin appeal. To that end, the Greensboro facility has a complete and well-equipped design studio.

Fujino says the single-pilot-certified version is marketed primarily to individuals and corporations rather than to fleet buyers, but the company portrays a 2+6 seating arrangement as well. The HondaJet faces stiff competition, particularly from Embraer’s Phenom 100 and the M2, Cessna’s new successor to the Citation CJ1+.

Photo Credit: George C. Larson/AWST
GEORGE LARSON/AVIATION WEEK

Source;

http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story_generic.jsp?channel=awst&id=news/awst/2011/10/10/AW_10_10_2011_p61-375968.xml&headline=HondaJet%20Likely%20To%20Be%20First%20Of%20A%20Family&next=10