Mitsubishi’s SpaceJet fail leaves Japan’s aviation dreams in tatters (and coronavirus isn’t to blame)

Mitsubishi Aircraft Corporation is to cut 95 per cent of the employees working on its troubled SpaceJet aircraft

Move is final nail in the coffin for a project that was supposed to jump-start a Japanese domestic aerospace industry

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Mitsubishi’s SpaceJet project has effectively been grounded. Photo: Handout

Published: 9:30am, 19 Dec 2020Updated: 9:11pm, 19 Dec 2020

Japan’s Mitsubishi Aircraft Corporation is putting a brave face on the news that it is planning to cut about 95 per cent of the employees working on its SpaceJet aircraft, insisting that the changes are merely a “reorganisation” of the project.

Analysts, however, say the cuts are effectively the final nail in the coffin of an aircraft that had massive government support and was meant to serve as the basis of a new Japanese aerospace industry.

And they add that while the effective termination of the SpaceJet project coincides with the global coronavirus pandemic, which has rocked the global aviation industry to its foundations, the health crisis has virtually no impact on the failure of the aircraft. SpaceJet and its predecessor project, the Mitsubishi Regional Jet, were moribund as much as three years ago, one analyst said, and the coronavirus may be a convenient way of drawing a final line under the programme.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the parent firm, announced in October that it would suspend development of the SpaceJet and sharply reduce the budget. National broadcaster NHK reported this week that staff working on the programmes would be cut to the “bare minimum” of just 150 people from April, the start of the new financial year, and development work at the company’s facilities in the US state of Washington would be effectively halted. Test flights of the four prototype aircraft will be halted and future work limited to maintenance.

A spokesperson for Mitsubishi Aircraft told the South China Morning Post that the company was “not officially” making a statement on staffing for the project, but was “considering a reorganisation and restructuring of the company”.

A SpaceJet model on display at the Mitsubishi Aircraft Corporation booth during the Singapore Airshow. Photo: AFP

Geoff Tudor, a Tokyo-based analyst for Japan Aviation Management Research, was more blunt, saying, “It’s over. It’s a failure.”

“There are many reasons why it has failed, but the primary one is that Mitsubishi had far too much belief in its own ability and chose not to take advice from other aircraft manufacturers at the outset,” he said. “They thought they could do it all, but they quickly found out that was just impossible. They overreached.”