I've been working for quite some time now at Honda. I'm not in any way related to the new HondaJet project, but it's still pretty neat to watch Honda venture into this area. You can watch the HondaJet making it's first flight earlier this month. If it's like what happened in the automotive industry, maybe a company like Honda can force the prices of these aircraft down while improving on quality.


Honda's piston engine in development

What I'm mostly interested in is Honda's development of a piston engine for small aircraft. Right now, even brand new aircraft rely on engines that are heavily steeped in 1950's era technology, simply because it is too expensive for manufacturers to obtain FAA certification, so they continue to sell engines that are just plain old. Reliable, but old. For example, having fuel injection in your piston engine is very rare! To make matters worse, the cost of a small engine that you'd typically find in a Cessna is around $20,000! Again, I'm really hoping that Honda can bring market pressures to bear on engine manufacturers so that consumers can be the real winners.