Four engineers and a secret

Honda, the motorcycle and car maker, first dipped a toe into aviation in 1964, when it set up a small flying company to gather know-how. The serious effort began in 1986 as a top-secret project inside Honda R&D, a team of four engineers sent to work with Mississippi State University’s Raspet Flight Research Laboratory. Their experimental MH02, first flown on 5 March 1993, was the first all-composite light business jet to fly. Among the team was a young engineer from the University of Tokyo, Michimasa Fujino.

Engines on top of the wing

Fujino began sketching his own jet in 1997. Its defining feature was one that designers had tried and abandoned: engines on pylons above the wing. Earlier attempts, including Germany’s VFW 614, had suffered drag at speed. Fujino found a position where the airflow around the engine and over the wing actually reduced wave drag, freeing the fuselage from engine mounts and giving a longer, quieter cabin. He paired it with a natural laminar flow wing and a carbon composite fuselage, and said the shape of the nose was inspired by Salvatore Ferragamo shoes. Honda even developed its own engine, the HF120, with GE.

Twenty years to a company

The proof-of-concept HondaJet flew at Greensboro on 3 December 2003. In August 2006, twenty years after the project began, Honda Aircraft Company was founded as a wholly owned subsidiary with Fujino as president, and Honda Motor went on to invest more than $200 million turning a single hangar into a campus of over 133 acres. Certification took longer than promised: the first delivery, once planned for 2010, came on 23 December 2015, after the FAA type certificate was granted that month.

World number one

Then the HondaJet started to win. In 2017 Honda delivered 43, overtaking Cessna’s Citation M2, and according to Japanese Wikipedia it led the light jet category for five straight years from 2017 to 2021. Upgrades followed: the Elite in 2018, the Elite S in 2021 and the Elite II in 2022. The type’s record has not been spotless; the first fatal HondaJet accident came at Mesa, Arizona, on 5 November 2024, when an aircraft overran on take-off and five people died. By the fourth quarter of 2025, 271 HondaJets had been built.

Echelon and beyond

Fujino reached Honda’s retirement age of 62 and stepped down in April 2022, handing over to Hideto Yamasaki. The next chapter is the HondaJet Echelon, unveiled as a concept in 2021 and launched in 2023: a larger, light-jet-class aircraft for up to 11 passengers with a range of about 2,625 nautical miles, its first flight planned for 2026. In October 2025 the company flew a HondaJet on 100 per cent sustainable aviation fuel, a first for a twin-engine very light jet maker.

Заводы

• Greensboro campus · Piedmont Triad International Airport, Greensboro, North Carolina — R&D centre, factory, customer service centre and headquarters

Люди

• Michimasa Fujino · founder, president and CEO 2006–2022 — HondaJet designer; elected to the US National Academy of Engineering in 2017
• Hideto Yamasaki · president and CEO from April 2022

Рекорды и первые достижения

• First all-composite light business jet to fly, the MH02, 1993
• Best-selling light jet in 2017, with 43 deliveries against 39 Citation M2s
• First twin-engine very light jet maker to fly on 100 per cent sustainable aviation fuel, October 2025
• AIAA Foundation Award for Excellence, 2018