Mitsubishi gives up on Japan's first domestically manufactured passenger jet Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI), a core company within Japan's Mitsubishi Group, announced on Tuesday that it was finally killing its regional aircraft, the SpaceJet. Although the decision was already made internally, Mitsubishi released the details of the cancelation to the public within its Q3 2022 reports. The company …
I'm not sure about MHI's optimism about transferring skills from regional jet design to next gen fighters... Unless carrying passengers while on sorties is a new way of funding the armed forces?
To be fair, starting with civil aircraft design skills is better than starting with no skills at all, but....
This despite pre-orders from Ryanair, who liked that idea.
“You complain that our destination airports are nowhere near where they claim to be - well with our new aircraft we can drop you off EXACTLY at the destination!*”
*terms and conditions apply. Optional parachute may be purchased for €49.99 at booking time, or with a winning onboard scratch-card purchase. Parachute will be mailed to you within 90 business days. No refunds even if unopened.
Also worth noting that Bombardier offloaded the entire CRJ program into MHI’s lap in mid-2020: https://bombardier.com/en/media/news/bombardier-concludes-sale-crj-series-regional-jet-program-mitsubishi-heavy-industries
Presumably this was an effort to stabilize the balance sheet after the bath that BBD took on C-series development before Covid.
The Chinese made the right decision to develop an A320-clone, which is one of the world's best selling aircraft.
The market for a regional jet is limited, although I would add that Embrear isn't doing to bad with its E190, which is similar in size and configuration to the SpaceJet. I've flown on the E190 and it's a workhorse within Europe and the U.S.
It was at one point shaping up to be a lovely little jet.
But I think that that was the problem, especially hovering in and around the absurd US "Scope Clause" specifications. Had they put the effort into a larger design... The market for the 737/A320-sized single aisle airliners is vast, and Airbus literally cannot make them fast enough. Boeing are selling MAXes only because Airbus can't kid even themselves that they could fulfil more orders than they already have. Had the Japanese turned up on the market with something that size, there'd have been a ton of airlines queuing up to buy it and Boeing might have got into a lot of trouble.
So, very nice design, but the wrong design. Not ambitious enough.
Interestingly, this is what Airbus got so very right. At the very beginning, Airbus had ambitions to sell aircraft, but never dreamed that they could challenge Boeing's vast market share. What Airbus's US-born chief salesman John Leahy did was drive Airbus's ambition, get them to set themselves up to be able to mass manufacture the A320. Unbelievably, the staid / conservative Europeans went along with the bold and brash idea, and the rest is history.
It feels like Mitsubishi tried to shy away from direct competition with Airbus / Boeing, when in fact they probably should have gone all-in and taken them both on. Even getting to only 10, 15% of the market share initially would be A Very Large Number of Orders. Timidity doesn't win, when you turn up with a pocket knife to a ruthless gun fight.
My experience in working with/dealing with Japanese companies is that they are (on the whole) immensely competent and their industries have everything they'd need to be world class leaders in the high tech industry. But it's the business culture that keeps blocking them from ever achieving anything. Getting anything done is a process of patience, hair-pulling, teeth-gnashing and bureaucracy. You'll never talk to the guy that actually makes the decisions and even if you do, he won't do so right then and there. Nobody seems to dare do anything that might cause even mild inconvenience for anyone else.
A lot of those got big despite the culture,started out with a different internal culture or operate mostly outside Japan with a less Japanese business structure. It also seems to have gotten worse over the decades, not better. Especially companies like Canon, Nikon, Toyota HAD a technological lead or where on the cutting edge and simple stopped moving forward. Canon and Nikon have lost a lot of footing in anything other than (consumer) cameras (and for instance their lithography arms lost out by basically trying to their sell camera lenses while ASML was busy selling a good business case), Toyota is stuck on hybrids after betting the farm on hydrogen fuel-cell tech (and failing because hydrogen was, is and always will be shit for vehicle energy storage). Sony -> Struggling on many fronts, Mitsubishi -> depends on which bit you're talking about, Nintendo -> MASSIVE pile of cash helps to keep going no matter what.
I think any engineer like me who's ever worked with a Japanese supplier has probably had similar frustrations. They're perfectly competent and deliver good wares if you stay exactly within the catalogue of existing products. Want something slightly different or with better specs (even if the product strictly speaking already meets this, so it would mean some cherry picking for a particular customer and a slightly updated spec sheet. Or just a different combination of existing products)? Yeah, no, that's going to take a long time. If you can make it happen at all.
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