Strutting down the tarmac headed toward a brand-new HondaJet, I try not to think about Honda’s current troubles with keeping a 1.6-liter V-6 running for the duration of a Formula 1 race, or that I’m trusting the same company that makes a pretty decent lawnmower to be responsible for elevating me and up to 10,600 pounds thousands of feet into the sky. Nervous fliers like me shouldn’t think about all that.

Irrational fears of flying aside—I know I’m more likely to crash and die in a car—the HondaJet is a pretty cool answer to a question few can afford to ask. Compared with the personal jets made famous by companies such as Lear, Gulfstream, and Dassault, the HondaJet HA-420 is smaller and lighter. The Federal Aviation Administration says a single pilot can operate one.

While not quite light enough to be considered a very light jet (VLJ), because its max takeoff weight just barely exceeds five tons, the HondaJet is similar in principle, with low(ish) operating costs, but it is still a jet and commands a jet-age price. The twin-engine HondaJet starts at $4,900,000, and keeping it in the air is an investment, too. Operating costs have tons of variables, but most estimates put the HondaJet’s operation at just over $1000 per hour (this includes maintenance, fuel, depreciation, and other factors).

A Leap into the Sky

Honda’s dream to go flying started in the late 1980s and blossomed into the MH02, an experimental high-wing jet built in conjunction with Mississippi State University. That plane flew in 1993, a decade before the HondaJet’s first flight. It took another dozen years to get official permission to sell the HA-420.

Since it received FAA certification in December 2015, Honda Aircraft Company has delivered about 60 HondaJets to customers and claims to have 100 orders in total. The Greensboro, North Carolina, factory can produce between 80 and 100 per year. So figure to wait a year if you hop on the list now.

About half of the HondaJet buyers are owner-operators. They’re hands-on flyers who want to move up from prop planes and make the jump to jets. To get type certification in the HJ, pilots spend two weeks in Honda’s simulator at the Greensboro campus, with a few more days tacked on if they aren’t familiar with the Garmin G3000–powered cockpit. Its five screens, including three 14.1-inch main displays and two smaller 5.7-inch touchscreens for management, give the pilot all the information one needs and, in general, clean up the layout. There are so few buttons and knobs—the engine-start buttons look as if they were lifted out of an S2000 and given an aluminum plating—that it seems as if a novice could figure it out. But we know that isn’t the case. Most insurers prefer that pilots new to such planes spend 25 hours in the cockpit with an instructor alongside, too.

High Performer

Our flight was short, a quick jump from San Francisco to Monterey, California. It’s about 110 miles on the road, about 30 miles shorter through the sky. (With four people onboard, the HondaJet can travel just over 1400 miles before having to refuel.) But it was long enough to experience the plane. For starters, the HJ will figuratively stand on its tail with the ability to climb at nearly 4000 feet per minute. Airliners typically climb at half that rate. Our pilot showed off a little with a high-performance takeoff. It’s the aero equivalent of a brake-torque launch: max thrust with the brakes on, then release the brakes for an aeronautic hole shot. A new Accord might beat the HondaJet to 60 mph, but turbofans have no match once at speed.

At maximum takeoff weight, the HondaJet takes flight at about 138 mph (120 knots for the flying nerds). We were surely lighter and probably didn’t need that speed, but we were airborne in about 1500 feet with the Honda/GE engines each providing 2050 pounds of thrust.

Once in the air, the cabin is quiet. Maybe not nose-of-a-747 quiet but as quiet as any main cabin we’ve experienced. Part of this is by design. The bulbous nose generates laminar flow, meaning the air doesn’t get turbulent and add unnecessary drag. The engines aren’t centered on their pylons, either. And those mounting posts act, in part, like a bargeboard on an open-wheel race car, only these maximize the laminar flow all the way to the tail. The over-wing engine mounts are unique to the Honda as well. Locating them over the wing—and not at the aft of the fuselage as is standard in the industry—allows for a rather expansive 57-cubic-foot cargo hold behind the main cabin and a private lavatory. There is another nine-cube bay in the nose.

HondaJet fuselages are made of carbon fiber and aluminum. Honda admits it could stretch the design if the need for a larger cabin arises. In its standard configuration, the cabin can accommodate six passengers (including one or two pilots), but there is an optional seven-seat layout that adds a side-facing seat across from the main door. A larger version of the plane probably will happen, but airplane life cycles are measured in decades, so don’t expect a HondaJet L any time soon.

Both the fore-aft and side-to-side location of the moderate-bypass engines was nitpicked. Moving them just a little forward or a little aft of their final location would increase fuel consumption and impede speed—that’s an impressively Honda-like laser focus on efficiency.

With the cruise control set to long-range cruise (414 mph, 1 percent worse fuel mileage than the maximum range setting, and thus faster), the HondaJet burns about 165 gallons of fuel over 600 nautical miles (690 miles), which equates to about 4 mpg. To put that in perspective, a Cessna 150—a small, affordable, four-cylinder prop-driven aircraft—cruises at about 100 mph with the fuel economy of a Chevrolet Suburban (about 19 mpg). Trust us when we say that 4 mpg is great for a 400-mph aircraft.

Supreme Convenience

We got nowhere near the 43,000-foot maximum altitude on our short flight. Large windows fitted with electrochromic shades that darken at the touch of a button allow for great viewing of the ground, which—when the HondaJet is pressed—will pass by at a maximum of 486 mph. But we found ourselves fixating on the wings. Like the engines, Honda developed its own airfoil for the HJ to maximize performance and minimize risk of losing control. The wings themselves are machined from giant ingots of aluminum, with the ribs and spars integral with the top skin. Unlike a commercial plane, with wings that flex to alarming angles in routine flight, the HondaJet’s wings look almost rigid, like giant toothpicks bent up at their outer ends and then transversely stuck through a cocktail weenie.

On approach, the pilot banked sharply around Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. Sitting on the left side, I had to lean over to the right and I was reminded of how tight the cabin is. Anyone taller than four-foot-ten must crouch. But the seats are very comfortable, with fore-aft, recline, and even side-to-side position adjustments, and they’re swaddled in ultrasoft leather that would make an Acura interior designer red in the face.

Then the pilot made a rather steep approach into Monterey and I got a little green with fear. I was so comfortable in the plane that my irrational fears of a midair breakup had drifted into the same cranial compartment where I store the oft-forgotten reminder to take out the trash on Sundays. After an uneventful landing and a short taxi, I was in the back seat of an Acura MDX. No jet bridge, no schlepping luggage through the terminal, no curbside pickup in a rattly shuttle van. If you can swing the cost, avoiding those annoyances may just be worth the HondaJet’s five million bucks.

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