Is there a flying car in your future?
Honda Motor President Takeo Fukui, when he's not fixated on selling the world more Civics and Accords, dreams about airplanes for the masses. It's a dream his predecessors had quietly and carefully tended since founder Soichiro Honda spoke of his ambition to build an aircraft in the early 1960s.
Now, at last, the dream is taking shape. Without much fanfare Honda has built a remarkably efficient jet engine and ultralight airframe that could be put together to make a personal airplane. It would be the biggest revolution in travel since the commercial jet.
A flying car in every garage? For the moment, a bit laughable. But already some of the keenest minds in the airline business are thinking about miniaturizing aviation. Witness the air-taxi firm being put together by Robert Crandall and Donald Burr. Also note that United Technologies' Pratt & Whitney and Williams International are planning to sell tiny turbofan engines to such airplanemakers as Adam Aircraft, Eclipse Aviation, Diamond Aircraft and Cessna. Their planes cost around $2 million.
Now Honda, in much the same way it ambushed U.S. carmakers in the 1970s with cheap and efficient autos, is aiming to take a big piece of the microaviation market. It has designed a turbofan engine that weighs only 392 pounds and delivers 1,600 pounds of thrust. Attached to an experimental HondaJet body, the engine powers a six-seat jet with 40% better fuel efficiency (in nautical miles per pound of fuel) than similar jets now on the market.
Thriftier engines, cheaper cockpit computers and lighter planes could lower a jet's per-mile operating cost (which includes maintenance, insurance and storage) from $4 to $1.50, says Bruce Holmes, who oversees aerospace innovations at the U.S. National Aeronautics & Space Administration research center in Hampton, Virginia.
Just as the automobile created the suburbs, personal flying machines could create meta-urbs, with lakeside acres replacing cramped condominiums. If people can buy a house far from the city for, say, $400,000 and fly to work, instead of paying $1.2 million for a house within driving distance to the city, a private plane begins to make sense. "Take a look at those horrible traffic jams in L.A. Wouldn't you rather live outside the city and fly to work?" asks Honda's Fukui.
The engine is scheduled to hit the market by 2007 at $300,000. Honda has formed a joint venture in Cincinnati, Ohio with General Electric to market and support its engines. GE is helping Honda through the safety testing required for U.S. Federal Aviation Administration certification--including the bird strike test, in which four-pound euthanized seagulls are sucked into the engine to see if it can take the punishment a real flock can inflict. The GE-Honda venture is already in talks with airframe manufacturers, including Brazil's Embraer and three other firms.
"GE is very impressed with the careful and methodical approach Honda has taken, focused on affordability, light weight, fuel efficiency, reliability and low cost of ownership," says David Calhoun, head of GE Transportation, which makes its own aircraft engines. "Now we need to change it from lab product to mass-produced item."
John Wright, vice president of business aviation for Pratt & Whitney, says, "We've been in the turbine business for 40 years and have tremendous aftermarket support, and that's what operators are going to be looking for. But I don't take competition lightly."
Honda, however, is looking beyond engines. Though company officials say they have no current plan to market the HondaJet, it seems unlikely that Honda bothered to design and build its own airframe merely to test an engine. "If they wanted to fly an engine, they could have just used an existing airframe," says Vern Raburn, chief executive of Eclipse Aviation, one of the first producers of a very light minijet. |
