Plane Conversations

In recent posts I have talked about the need to bridge the price gap between travel using private aviation (corporate jets) and using air mass-transit ( the airlines) if private aviation is to expand its market.

The gap can be incrementally closed if the costs of flying in private aircraft can be reduced with lower operating costs using new generation aircraft, utilizing aircraft more efficiently and selling seats on the aircraft instead of buying the whole aircraft for a charter flight.

In a March 4, 2010, Popular Mechanic online article by Glen Harlan Reynolds has the following headline about the new HondaJet:

Can Honda Bring Corporate-Style Jet Travel to the Masses?

Included below are excerpts from the article which is well worth the time to read in its entirety.

Private jet travel is convenient, luxurious and, of course, very expensive. The Honda Jet represents an effort at changing that, by using technology and design to bring costs down and allow private-jet travel at costs that approach commercial ticket prices

So my column for the magazine in a couple of months is on new approaches to air travel. In the course of writing it, I spent a day with the pilots, engineers and designers of an aircraft that’s meant to bring about just that sort of new approach: the HondaJet, a fast, comparatively cheap five-passenger Very Light Jet that Honda hopes will not only appeal to the usual run of corporate-jet purchasers, but that will also promote an entirely new way of flying, one that’s capable of bridging the gap between cheap-but-unreliable commercial jet travel and swanky-but-expensive corporate jet travel. What I saw makes me think that the Honda folks just may be onto something.

This is no secret, of course, to the people who travel by private jet now. But private jet travel is very expensive, which is why it is the domain of CEOs, celebrities and the like. The HondaJet represents an effort at changing all of that, by using technology and design to bring costs down and allow private-jet travel at costs that approach commercial ticket prices.  (Fully loaded, Fujino says, the cost per seat on the HondaJet should be roughly comparable to a first-class commercial ticket). To keep costs down, the Honda folks have put a lot of thought into ways to make the plane as small and inexpensive as possible, without sacrificing comfort or speed. .

Overall, the HondaJet has a sleekness and a friendly, pleasing personality that reminds me of an iPhone, or some other cleverly designed bit of consumer hardware. You just want to like it.

What about the environment, though? Won’t all these small jets zipping around be worse for emissions than a few big ones? The answer seems to be no. Based on fuel consumption, speed and range, the HondaJet seems to be just about exactly as efficient per seat-mile as the ubiquitous Canadair CRJ-200 regional jet. But that probably understates things, because if I were flying from Knoxville to, say, Washington, D.C., I’d be traveling a straight-line distance of 353 nautical miles, while if I took a commercial flight, I’d probably be going by way of Atlanta for a distance of 605 nautical miles. (I’d also have a travel time of about an hour on the HondaJet, rather than something like 4 hours traveling via Atlanta.) So while the precise environmental impact of replacing hub-and-spoke commercial travel with direct-flight travel on the HondaJet is open to dispute, it seems unlikely that there will be much impact.

Honda hopes that the plane will sell not only to the usual run of jet customers, but to air-taxi services, and, in fact, Fujino, who makes a point of calling the HondaJet an Advanced Light Jet rather than a Very Light Jet, tells me that they expect this to be a case of the product driving the market. Although other efforts to build an on-demand air-taxi market at low cost have stalled with the current economic downturn, those efforts faced financial and technological problems that Honda expects to avoid, and by the time the HondaJets are rolling off the line at full speed, there’s a good chance that the economy will have recovered. So the air-taxi model—where you got to a website, enter your destination, and have a small jet swoop down to pick you up, possibly at a small business airport rather than a big one where parking and security hassles are greater—may well have a chance.

I certainly would like to see something like that happen. I fly coach myself; I’ll occasionally spring for an upgrade to first class when the airline offers me a deal, but when I do take the upgrade I’m usually underwhelmed. To me, the problem with air travel as it exists now isn’t a lack of free drinks, but a lack of convenient scheduling, and the risk of delays caused by missed connections.

If Honda gets it right they will certainly be part of the solution. I hope they do and I look forward to seeing them flying next year.

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