Overview
Honda Aircraft Company is the aviation arm of Honda Motor Company, formed in 2006 to bring a single product to market: the HondaJet, a very light business jet. Led from the outset by engineer Michimasa Fujino and headquartered in Greensboro, North Carolina, the company earned FAA type certification for the HA-420 in December 2015 and has since delivered the aircraft to customers in more than 40 countries. For several consecutive years the HondaJet has been among the most-delivered aircraft in its category.
Heritage
The HondaJet began as a skunkworks study inside Honda R&D in 1986, when Fujino and a small team set out to apply Honda’s engineering culture to an aircraft rather than a car or motorcycle. The project stayed largely secret for two decades, flying a proof-of-concept before Honda committed to production and stood up Honda Aircraft Company in 2006. That long gestation shows in the finished product: the HA-420 was designed as an integrated whole – airframe, wing, and engine installation developed together – rather than assembled from off-the-shelf parts, and Honda partnered with GE to form GE Honda Aero Engines, which builds the HF120 turbofan that powers it.
Design Signature
One idea defines every HondaJet: the over-the-wing engine mount. Placing the turbofans on pylons above the wing, rather than the aft fuselage, removes the structure that normally intrudes into a light jet’s cabin and tail, and – counter to aviation intuition – was shown through years of wind-tunnel and flight work to lower transonic drag rather than add it. Around that centerpiece Honda layered a natural-laminar-flow wing and nose and an all-carbon-composite fuselage, yielding a jet that is faster, quieter, and roomier than its footprint suggests. The signature has carried straight through the line, from the original HondaJet to the automation-laden Elite II.
For Owners
Honda supports the fleet from its Greensboro campus with factory service and offers the HF120 on GE Honda’s EMC hourly maintenance programs, which smooth engine cost into a predictable per-hour rate. The current Elite II adds Garmin Autothrottle and Emergency Autoland, pushing single-pilot owner operation further than any twinjet before it. Looking ahead, Honda has announced the clean-sheet Echelon, a larger transcontinental light jet meant to carry the company beyond the HA-420 – a sign Honda intends to remain in aviation well beyond a single model.
