{:en}
Robotic production, total control of each assembly stage, strict internal regulations form the conditions for the release of a truly revolutionary light business jet.<\/p>\n
Once at the Honda Aircraft plant, one can understand why Michimasa Fujino, the company's president and CEO, is so proud of his brainchild, the HondaJet. Robotic production, total control of each assembly stage, strict internal regulations form the conditions for the release of a truly revolutionary light business jet. The emergence of the HondaJet is a kind of culmination, the embodiment of Michimas Fujino's long-held dream of creating an ultra-modern, economical and lightweight jet aircraft. He personally oversaw the creation of the HondaJet, from concept to certification of the finished model. He personally promotes and safeguards the first Japanese aircraft, which is likely to become a “pioneer” for the whole family of Honda aircraft. <\/p>\n
\n
In May, the BizavNews team, together with our friends from Aim of Emperor (a dealer of HondaJet aircraft in Russia and the CIS), went to distant North Carolina to visit Honda Aircraft. We have already managed to acquaint our readers with our impressions of the HondaJet Elite. Now it's time to take a walk through the factory itself.<\/p>\n
Japanese mentality<\/b><\/p>\n
The Honda Aircraft plant is located at Piedmont Triad International Airport in Greensboro. The first impression is a city within a city. The company has fully provided itself with infrastructure, which makes it possible to produce aircraft almost autonomously, with the exception of the power plants, which are manufactured in the American city of Burlington, and the fuselages. The fuselage parts are fabricated at GKN Aerospace (the world's largest supplier of complex composite structures) in Tallassie, Alabama, and then shipped for assembly to a plant in Orangeburg, South Carolina. The fuselage parts are hand-laid in concave shapes and fabricated using carbon fiber sheet material pre-impregnated with epoxy resin. It has toughness and toughness \u2014 properties that are essential for aerospace applications. <\/p>\n
\n
The first thing that catches your eye when you get into production is fantastic cleanliness. From the abundance of white shades, regular shapes and friendly looks from employees, you involuntarily fall in love with an airplane that you have never seen. Everything here is steeped in Japanese culture. The concept of management, based on a sense of duty to the team, in the Japanese mentality is almost identical to the feeling of shame. To do badly is to let the team down. Therefore, the attitude to work is very serious. Top management at Honda Aircraft has succeeded in instilling these principles in its multinational workforce. Once inside, you notice that the company's work environment is similar to a Honda car factory: ceilings, walls and floors are bright white, illuminated from above by LED matrices. All employees of the company are dressed in white overalls with names embroidered on the right side for easy identification.<\/p>\n
Honda Aircraft uses conveyor assembly of aircraft. Everything here is robotized and computerized, but the role of the personnel is not at all “conditional”. Total control of all stages of production is the main tenet of the company. Stage by stage, the “skeleton” of the future business jet takes on the appearance of a future aircraft: the wings and fuselage are docked, engines and avionics are installed. Then the plane goes to the interior installation shop and then to the paint shop. And all this is under the vigilant control of many computers, sensors and, of course, the company's specialists. By the way, the fuselage is made of carbon composite materials with aluminum reinforcing elements, the nose is smoothed for laminar flow. The company claims that as a result, the drag of the fuselage is reduced by 10% compared to conventional fuselages of the same size. And one more know-how. A special SHM-1 laminar wing profile was also developed for the HondaJet. The wing section with this profile was tested on the T-33 flying laboratory. For this, the required profile was formed directly on the T-33 skin using polyurethane foam and sheathed with fiberglass. 119 pressure sensors were installed under the new skin.<\/p>\n
Looking at how the process is built, it becomes obvious that at the moment, the priority areas of the plant are research, design, development and testing. For example, a HondaJet aircraft is designed for 20,000 fatigue life cycles, and it has already \u201csurvived\u201d 15,000 out of 40,000 cycles on the test bench. In the R&D department, there is a strong focus on design details. Rigorous tests of the acoustic characteristics of the fuselage made it possible to accurately identify the sources of noise and to manufacture a special insulation coating for the panels of each section of the aircraft cabin, depending on the frequency and amplitude of the sound. <\/p>\n
\n
Directly at the plant, customers can decide on the interior and additional equipment of the future business jet, and undergo piloting training. On a pleasant note, along with the purchase of the aircraft, the manufacturer provides free initial training for two pilots. Training can take place here in the training center on a flight simulator developed in cooperation with FlightSafety International. You can also test the aircraft itself at the production site in Greensboro on a demonstration HondaJet. Its own apron and taxiways, which lead directly to the airport runway, allow organizing a demonstration flight in a matter of minutes.<\/p>\n
The special pride of Honda Aircraft is the aircraft delivery center, where new aircraft are handed over to customers in an official setting. The interior of the building is designed in the image of a podium: a rotating panel is installed in the center, on which an airplane transferred to the client moves in a circle in the beams of spotlights. Not surprisingly, such a spectacular HondaJet broadcast creates a festive atmosphere and grants an entrance ticket to the major league of private jet owners. <\/p>\n
\n
A look into the future<\/b><\/p>\n
Speaking about future plans, it is interesting to note one nuance. The company's campus is tailored to the dimensions of future HondaJet models: the hangar doors, for example, are almost twice the height of the T-shaped tail of the HondaJet HA-420, and the opening width is more than twice the 40-foot (12.19 m) span airplane wing. Moreover, there is a sufficient supply of open adjacent territory for further expansion. A few numbers. The plant is located on an area of 538.2 thousand square meters, and only 63.1 thousand square meters. mastered at the present time. The largest facility of the plant is an assembly line (24.1 thousand sq. M.), Followed by a research center (17.5 thousand sq. M.) And an after-sales service center (8.5 thousand sq. M.) ). The rest of the land is covered for the future construction of new infrastructure facilities. <\/p>\n
\n
In July of this year, the Honda Aircraft Company began construction of a new wing assembly facility at its headquarters in Greensboro. The company is investing $ 15.5 million in the construction of a 7,700 sqm facility, which will be commissioned in July 2020. The total investment in infrastructure facilities already exceeds $ 245 million, Mitimasa Fujino told BizavNews. \u201cOur new production hall will enable the company to significantly increase production efficiency. As the popularity and presence of HondaJet continues to grow globally, we need new manufacturing facilities that can reduce the time it takes to assemble aircraft on the one hand and reduce the risk of working with subcontractors. “<\/p>\n
The company now produces 4-5 aircraft per month. And in total, since the beginning of deliveries, the manufacturer has handed over to customers almost 150 machines. In 2018, HondaJet became the most delivered business jet in its class (VLJ – Very Light Jet), when the company delivered 37 aircraft to customers around the world. It is noteworthy that a year earlier, HondaJet also topped the ranking of deliveries in the ultralight business jet class. Agree, these figures are the best proof that the first plane of Mitimasa Fujino turned out to be a very successful dream come true.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
{:en}Robotic production, total control of each assembly stage, strict internal regulations form the conditions for the release of a truly revolutionary light business jet. Once at the Honda Aircraft plant, one can understand why Michimasa Fujino, the company's president and CEO, is so proud of his brainchild, the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2445,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[264],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hondanet.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3521"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hondanet.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hondanet.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hondanet.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hondanet.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3521"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hondanet.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3521\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hondanet.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hondanet.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hondanet.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hondanet.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}