Honda’s Big Bet
Seeking to enter the aviation field with a splash, the manufacturer breaks with tradition regarding design, development, marketing and sales. We’ll know soon enough whether its gambit will pay off
By Matt Thurber - January 2, 2009
If Honda Aircraft founder, president and chief visionary Michimasa Fujino is right, when you step into one of his dealerships to put down a deposit on a HondaJet or get yours serviced, your experience will be a lot more like visiting an Acura dealer than a traditional business jet manufacturer.
Such manufacturers specialize in building airplanes, not running dealerships, and in Fujino’s view, they make a mistake by not leaving sales and service to experts in those fields. Aircraft manufacturers, he believes, should focus on designing and building models that will attract buyers and assign the sales and service to a motivated dealer network. An auto dealer, he likes to point out, is an entrepreneur who has invested financial and sweat equity in his business, and that investment won’t pay off unless he delivers an outstanding experience to the customer.
Fujino has worked at Honda for more than two decades, having joined the company after graduating from college in 1986 with an aeronautical engineering degree. He appreciates Honda’s culture, especially when it comes to selling products like Acura luxury cars to high-net-worth customers. In fact, the Acura business model fits so well with Fujino’s plans for HondaJet that he tapped Acura’s top marketer, Doug Danuser, to run Honda Aircraft’s sales and marketing operation.
Honda in general and Honda Aircraft in particular are not trend followers, and Fujino knew that for a new business jet to succeed it would have to be different enough to attract attention; stamping the Honda name on an ordinary jet wouldn’t suffice.
In the mid-1990s, Fujino began wondering why typical business jets have engines mounted on the aft fuselage. Engine installations require structure and systems, which take up space. “If I could eliminate all this structure and all the systems and put them outside [the fuselage],” he said, “we could maximize inside space without increasing the size of the airplane.” Fujino explored numerous engine-mounting schemes, and one configuration stood out as a possible efficient alternative: engines mounted on pylons attached to the upper wing.
Greater Efficiency
The over-the-wing configuration turned out to deliver a bonus besides increased cabin space–a remarkable 5-percent improvement in efficiency. What Fujino discovered is that the over-the-wing engine design delayed the onset of high-speed drag so much that the jet could fly efficiently at a faster speed. “It was very exciting,” he said.
Here is where Honda further departed from how people typically launch a business jet manufacturing company. Not only did Honda build and fly a prototype jet that was aerodynamically and structurally almost identical to the finished product, but a separate group of experts at the company manufactured an engine for it from scratch. This effort turned out so well that General Electric later formed a 50-50 partnership with Honda to design, build and market an upgraded version of the engine; the resulting GE Honda HF120 is the engine that powers the market-bound HondaJet.
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