Japanese Commercial Aircraft Renaissance Cut Short

Japan has a fairly vibrant aerospace industry. Japan builds many of the aircraft it uses for the Air Self Defence Forces, including contract manufacturing the F-15, the "original design" Mitsubishi F-2 (which is an enlarged F-16), and the completely original Kawasaki C-2 Transport and T-4 Jet Trainer, for example. Where Japan hasn't been competitive is in the field of commercial aircraft. At first look, this is somewhat confounding. Japan, a nation of islands, has a robust passenger airline business. Sure the Shinkansen "bullet trains" provide a substitute for some commercial flights, particularly on the Tokyo-Osaka route, but there are many more remote locations that still need to be served by air, thus ensuring long-term demand, particularly for small to medium sized "regional jets."

From the mid 1990s, the regional jet competitive space was effectively a duopoly between Canada's Bombardier CRJ and Embraer's ERJ series. Regional jets don't typically fly the same routes as larger capacity aircraft, or if they do, they fly off hours. The definition of a regional jet is not set by regulation, it is a term used in the industry, and it typically refers to jets with less than 100 seats. Some of this restriction is to meet route demand, but some of it -particularly in the US- is to meet the demands of scope clauses. Scope clauses came into being in the mid 2010s, as airlines and pilot's unions reached agreement to limit regional airliners to 76 seats or less in a complex algorithm designed to prevent airlines from substituting full-sized commercial jets, flown by unionized pilots employed by the main airline, with regional jets flown by non-union pilots employed by a subsidiary airline or a contracted 3rd party "feeder" airline.

For this reason, regional jets from Bombardier and Embraer were designed and built within the capacity demanded by these "scope clauses." Larger versions could have been built for use in markets where the scope clauses do not apply, but for the most part, Bombardier and Embraer stuck to the regional jet limit.

With the growth of air travel in the early to mid 2000s, several nations began development programs to create their own regional jets. Russia entered with the Sukhoi Superjet 100 and China produced the COMAC ARJ21. Both of these programs were modestly successful, with over 200 Sukhoi Superjets in service with 4 airlines, and with the COMAC ARJ21 delivering over 100 aircraft to 10 customers, including one discount overseas airline in Indonesia - the first export of the type.

Japan also made a concerted effort to enter the market. In 2003, the Japanese government funded a 50 billion yen program to produce a Japanese regional jet. Mitsubishi led the project and pushed for many technological firsts. The aircraft was designed to be the first regional jet with an all-composite airframe. It would utilize the brand new Pratt & Whitney PW1000G engine, a high bypass geared turbofan. Geared turbofans use a gearbox instead of extra compressor and turbine sections to allow the fan to shaft and fan to spin at different speeds, simplifying the overall design of the engine and significantly reducing weight for increased fuel efficiency and lower noise. However manufacturing the planetary gear reduction gearbox increases manufacturing costs, and introduces more moving parts which could fail. Pratt & Whitney's chief competitor, CFM (a joint venture of GE and Safran), chose not to go with a geared design for its LEAP engine (used in the Airbus A320neo, Boeing 737 MAX, and COMAC C919), citing concerns about reliability.

The Mitsubishi Regional Jet or MRJ program would not only be a big leap forward in terms of technology. It would also be Japan's first attempt at a commercial airliner since the 1964 NAMC YS-11 turboprop. That aircraft had been modestly successful with 182 produced for commercial clients in over 21 countries, as well as the Greek Air Force, Japanese Self Defence Forces, and Japanese Coast Guard. The Japanese Air Self Defence Force retired their last YS-11 in 2021! Being released in 1964, the same year as the first run of the Shinkansen and the year of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, it was forever linked in the minds of many Japanese with the peak of Japan's post-war optimism.

The MRJ was born into a very different Japan. By the time the much-delayed MRJ was rolled out at Komaki airport near Nagoya for testing, Japan had been stuck in economic malaise for more than 20 years. The "lost decade" had stretched into a "lost generation," and optimism about the future of the nation was in extremely short supply. The MRJ had also undergone several significant design changes, with aluminum replacing most of the carbon fiber composites, and the fuselage had been enlarged, giving it a higher ceiling and wader body than any of its competition. Mitsubishi was also using new and unusual production methods to reduce costs and speed production. For carbon fiber components, they used vacuum assisted resin transfer. Curved surfaces were shot peened to reach their design shape. And tolerances were extremely tight, meaning that manufactured parts had to be produced to an unheard-of level of precision to avoid being out-of-spec.

The test aircraft performed well, and orders began to roll in. Japanese, Swedish, and American carriers all placed orders. Critically though, the main airframe design, the MRJ90, was not compliant with US scope clauses in weight or number of seats. The MRJ70 was compliant, but only seated 69, which was 7 seats less than the maximum allowed. In 2018, competitor Bombardier sued Mitsubishi, alleging industrial espionage and theft of trade secrets in order to pass certification requirements in the US. By April 2019, a judge dismissed Bombardier's claims for lack of evidence. Ironically, less than 2 months later, Mitsubishi would buy Bombardier's CRJ program (a regional jet that had been dominant, but was ending production as the production facility in Mirabel, Quebec had been taken over by the former CS100 aircraft line, recently purchased by Airbus and renamed the A220. Bombardier was in the process of exiting the commercial aircraft market.

Mitsubishi tried rebranding their aircraft as the Mitsubishi SpaceJet, to emphasize the larger fuselage that gave passengers more room in 2019, but problems and delays were mounting. COVID's impact on the airline industry drove Mitsubishi to cut the budget for the SpaceJet in half in 2020, and in 2021, Mitsubishi laid off 95% of its employees. In April 2022, one of the three prototypes was dismantled. Finally on February 6, 2023, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries ended the SpaceJet and began dissolving the Mitsubishi Aircraft Corporation subsidiary.

And so, the second Japanese attempt to enter commercial aircraft manufacturing post-WWII ended, not with a bang, but with a whimper. Japan is still a major supplier to Boeing and Airbus, and Japan still manufactures significant numbers of military jets, but its foray into the commercial space is done. One wonders, when, and if, they will try again.