Honda

Honda Aircraft Company was founded in 2006, nine years after an engineer at Honda R&D first drew the engine sitting above the wing, not behind it.

The project ran quietly for eleven years before it had a name. Honda R&D started work on an aircraft in 1986, and in 1997 the engineer Michimasa Fujino first drew the arrangement the company would go on to build around: engines carried above the wing rather than on the rear fuselage. Honda Aircraft Company followed in 2006 to produce it, and the FAA certified the HondaJet in December 2015. Close to thirty years separate the first work from the first delivery, done by a company that had never built an aeroplane before.

Honda's presence in this fleet is one aeroplane, which is also the whole of Honda's presence in aviation: the company builds a single type, and it sits in Very Light Jet. The over-wing arrangement is what makes the badge worth knowing rather than any figure, and the figures belong on the aircraft's own page. Carrying the engines on pylons above the wing leaves the rear fuselage empty, where in a light jet that volume is normally taken by the engines themselves. What follows from the geometry is the aircraft's business. What it means for the brand is that Honda arrived with a structural idea and no lineage at all.