Japanese industry is still digesting the country’s ambition to develop a new airliner, with a clear appreciation of the risks involved in a project of such magnitude.
The country’s Tier 1 manufacturers were hard hit by the failure of the Mitsubishi SpaceJet regional jet to enter production, according to an industry source familiar with Japan’s airliner ambitions.
The failure of the programme, which was finally shut down in 2023 after years of challenges and delays, will greatly influence future decisions.
Nonetheless, Japanese industry and Japan’s powerful Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) have started discussing how Japanese technology and know-how can be integrated into a new aircraft. Tokyo is prepared to invest around Y5 trillion ($31 billion) in the effort.
In March, the Japan Aircraft Development Corporation (JADC) laid out a new national aerospace strategy that underlined the lack of exposure by key aerospace firms such as Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI), Kawasaki Heavy Industries, and ShinMaywa to the booming narrowbody segment – the companies are key players on Boeing’s widebody programmes - and laid out the ambition to launch a new airliner in the 2030s.
METI, which oversees the JADC, feels that demand for narrowbody aircraft in the developing world will see aerospace industrial work move to new markets at the expense of Japanese industry. It also feels that Japan needs to capitalise on the learnings of the SpaceJet experience.
In June, Hiroyuki Koguchi, senior vice-president at MHI, gave a sense of the industry’s wariness, stating that the time is not yet right to commit to a new programme.
One challenge, says the source, will be selling the idea of an expensive new airliner to shareholders of listed Japanese firms. MHI reportedly sunk Y1 trillion into SpaceJet, which has previously been branded as the Mitsubishi Regional Jet, or MRJ.
Another challenge is that Japanese aerospace firms are projected to deploy growing resources to the defence sector as Tokyo beefs up its military capabilities to counter an increasingly militaristic China.
With key players such as MHI and the aerospace of division of IHI dedicating resources to the Global Air Combat Programme effort with Italy and the United Kingdom, as well as other defence programmes, the source says that fewer resources will be available for a prospective airliner programme.
Companies’ commitment to defence over the next 5-10 years means that the engineering and financial resources available for a new commercial aircraft will be “constrained.”
In addition, the JADC whitepaper noted that Japanese companies involved in commercial aerospace are involved in several other industries, thus reducing their ability to focus on aerospace. MHI, for example, is also involved in energy, industrial machinery, infrastructure, and other sectors.
Given Japan’s domestic industrial challenges, not to mention the complexity involved in a new airliner, the source suggests that there is a growing recognition that Japan not lead the effort on its own, as it did with SpaceJet, but cooperate with foreign aerospace firms. METI has already indicated that foreign involvement is likely to be key.
Moreover, cooperating with foreign partners will allow the new aircraft to benefit from existing after-sales service networks.
