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.

The HondaJet is the brainchild of Honda Aircraft president and CEO Michimasa Fujino. Fujino told me that his first job in the United States was in Mississippi, back in the 1980s, and that he found that wherever he traveled by air—even elsewhere in Mississippi—he usually wound up having to change planes in Atlanta. This seemed wasteful of time and fuel, and made travel iffier, since it created the risk of a missed connection. To Fujino, the hub-and-spoke system makes sense for a country like Japan, where Tokyo is at the center of everything, but much less sense for a country as big as the United States, where important places are widely distributed. For this, point-to-point travel is much better.

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.

This approach shows up in a lot of different places. To save weight (and hence fuel) the HondaJet's fuselage is all-composite construction. (I held some of the components in my hand—they were very stiff, but felt almost weightless.) The plane's engines are mounted, unusually enough, above rather than below the wings. This location change accomplishes two things: It allows the wings to be lowered, opening up more cabin space, and it means that the engines are directly above the landing gear, reducing wing loading on touchdown. (The over-the-wing placement also means that the wings baffle sound in flight, making things quieter on the ground). The HF-120 engines themselves are a new, lightweight, fuel-efficient design being codeveloped with General Electric.

Honda is also saving development money by taking advantage of modern computer power. Fujino notes that it's possible to do serious design work on a laptop nowadays, where not long ago it took an expensive engineering workstation. And Honda is making heavy use of simulations, with a sophisticated whole-aircraft simulator that allows real parts to be swapped in and tested against virtual parts and vice versa, allowing many stages of refinement before parts ever reach the test-flight stage. (When I flew the simulator, I noticed an antenna hanging over the plane: Turns out it transmits simulated GPS data to a real GPS receiver on the simulator, furthering Honda's goal of keeping things within the simulation as real as possible.)

The interior is also carefully contrived to provide space and comfort in as little room as possible. What Fujino says is that perceptions of luxury vary with time—the longer you're in a plane, the more uncomfortable a given set of accommodations will seem. (Even Air Force One, I've heard, feels cramped after a while). The HondaJet's relatively high speed (420 knots/485 mph) means that trips will tend to be short, so the cabin was optimized for comfort over a 2- to 3-hour period. I think it works. I'm a big guy—6 feet 3 inches and over 200 pounds—but I was comfortable in the cabin and seats. The built-in lavatory (the Honda folks were very proud that it has a real door, not simply an accordion door as in some small jets) was a bit tight for me, but adequate, and the lavatory ceiling features two skylights that provide a more spacious feel. Overall, the interior reminds me of an upscale Audi; when I mentioned that, the chief interior designer, Chris Osborne, told me that they had tried for a more Euro-style interior. I think they succeeded. The cargo compartment is surprisingly large too. The design manages to get a lot out of a little, without being too obvious about it. 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.

A high degree of automation shows up in the airplane's glass-cockpit approach to controls; the HondaJet is designed to be easy enough to fly that it can get by with a single pilot, also cutting costs. How easy is it to fly? Well, I managed to take off and land, in the simulator, without wrecking it, though I had a few pointers from Honda's chief test pilot, Warren Gould. Still, anything that I can manage is, by definition, user-friendly.

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. There's also a national-security angle: Crashing a 757, or even a Canadair regional jet, into a building would do a lot more damage than crashing a HondaJet into one. It's hard to weigh the importance of this factor, but it's certainly worth noting.

Overall, I found the HondaJet very appealing, and if I had in the neighborhood of $4 million to drop on an airplane I'd be sorely tempted. But since I don't—Popular Mechanics doesn't pay quite that well, and neither does my day job at the university—the real question is whether people who do have the money will shell out. That, obviously, depends. 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. (Ironically enough, a trip to Greensboro, N.C., was nearly scrubbed by problems in Atlanta en route). Free drinks are nice, I guess, but when your flight is canceled or delayed, the front part of the plane is just as inconvenienced as the back part of the plane. I'd be much more willing to pay first-class fare for a shorter flight that was more likely to get me there on time.

Are there enough people out there who feel the way I do? Honda thinks there are. Speaking selfishly, I hope they're right.

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