TOKYO – Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has resumed paintings for its SpaceJet passenger plane to qualify for advertising flights after completing a radical restructuring of its aerospace unit that led to the departure of its employees, he said Monday.
“We are leading our engineering team in a plan to discharge type certification effectively,” CFO Hisato Kozawa said at a press convention on results. “Once the plan is developed, we will put it into practice.”
Type certification shows that an aircraft is for advertising passengers. It is controlled by the aviation government in the United States, Europe and Japan.
Mitsubishi has been developing a 86-seater regional jet, called SpaceJet M90, since 2008. The much-delayed passenger jet is currently scheduled for delivery in fiscal 2021 at the earliest.
It is Japan’s first advertising passenger aircraft program in part of a century, for which the Japanese aerospace and defense subcontractor has invested at least 716 billion yen ($6.8 billion) to date.
Mitsubishi’s efforts to offload type certification were halted this year after the coronavirus hit the aviation industry. The pandemic had the engineers paint on the plane.
The resulting global recession also prevented Mitsubishi Heavy from proceeding with the lossy passenger aircraft program, as air traffic halted and eliminated demand for aircraft.
Fluid remains, with a new wave of international infections after the resumption of economic activity.
In the United States, the largest regional jet market run through Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, airlines have recently stepped up their cost-cutting efforts as demand recovery is delayed. United Airlines, for example, has said it would possibly have to fire more than a third of its drivers in 2020-21.
Kozawa identified the challenge of making plans as industry cases change.
“It’s hard to give a transparent view of the industry’s outlook,” he said. “Several reports and analyses have been proposed on the industry’s prospects. It will be between two and three years before air traffic is requested to return to its pre-crisis level. Then, the recovery of the aircraft will take between two and three years. have a similar point of view.”
In the first quarter of April to June, Mitsubishi Heavy reported an operational loss of 71.3 billion yen ($673 million). The loss was partly due to a 15% decrease in profits and reflected a decrease in demand for electric power turbines from Boeing’s utilities and aircraft bodies and wings, but also due to a reduction in the price of Mitsubishi’s advertising jet program acquired from the Canadian bomber in June.
Mitsubishi Heavy says the extent of the deterioration has yet to be completed, but is generally expected to reach about 60 billion yen ($566 million).
The SpaceJet program budget will remain at 60 billion yen for the year, part of last year’s target.
Mitsubishi Aircraft, which oversees SpaceJet’s development, has halved its 2,500 workers after finalizing its sites as a component of an emergency measure to reduce costs.
With production halted at Mitsubishi Aircraft due to the coronavirus pandemic, the company aims to validate the effects of more than 3900 hours of verification flights in recent years so that the M90 design meets regulatory requirements.
The M90 will need to go through final type certification tests in the United States before being declared fit for flight. Once type certification is obtained, Mitsubishi says it will re-evaluate the M90 market and potentially new models.
Subscribe to our newsletters to get our stories right in your inbox.
You want a subscription for Array ..