After its sensational debut at Oshkosh, the company’s view toward commercialization began to change, as customers even began to send in checks for the HondaJet. After numerous negotiations, Takeo Fukui, then president of Honda, green-lighted commercialization of the HondaJet in March 2006.
In the same year, the aircraft company’s headquarters was established in the United States, where demand for business jets was greatest and the flow of commercialization could be smoothly facilitated, and Fujino was appointed as its first president. From here, a new struggle toward commercialization began.
Obtaining type certification required for commercialization took an unimaginable amount of effort. After completing the design review to confirm that there were no problems with the design, durability of each component was checked, followed by durability of the aircraft itself, a test plane was built and tested many times to ensure that there would be no issues flying in cold weather or at high altitude, and the results of all these tests were documented and submitted to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for various approvals.
HondaJet obtained its type certification in 2015. During this period, HACI submitted 2.4 million pages of documents to the FAA, which, counting in A4 sheets of paper, would be 240 meters high and weigh 175.2 tons. After overcoming numerous hardships, HondaJet was successfully commercialized, three decades after the project was launched.
In 2022, HACI’s first president and CEO, Fujino, retired and Hideto Yamasaki assumed the position. In 2024, HACI reached a major milestone when Fujino became the first Japanese to receive the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Daniel Guggenheim Medal. Since, 2015 HondaJet has been delivered to North America, Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia, China, the Middle East, India, and Japan, with a total of 250 aircraft delivered (as of February 2024). No other aircraft with Over-The-Wing Engine Mount technology has been commercialized and operated as of 2024, thus continuing to prove the high level of HACI’s technological capabilities.
