My other Honda’s a MINI JET!
It’s the car f irm’s new nippy little four-seater. But would our test driver fall for the ‘Civic of the skies’?
THE long cross-country trek from Chester to Essex can be a real slog, nearly four hours by car on a good day. The same 200-mile trip by train takes just as long – not to mention the £160 ticket. But am I worried? No... I’m in the Honda.
True, the soft leather seats are rather more luxurious than the usual Japanese hatchback. I’d say it looks and smells more like a Bentley than a family runaround.
In fact, there are four comfy passenger seats with two up front, sleek fold-down tables, plenty of legroom and side windows that turn opaque at the flick of a switch. Not that you’d want to flick the switch – the view as you approach the top speed of 500mph is little short of stunning.
By then, you are cruising, whisper- quiet, at 43,000ft – that’s high above commercial airliners, l et alone crammed motorways. All in all, it seems a shame the entire journey takes only 40 minutes.
This, you may have gathered, is no ordinary Honda.
I’m sitting aboard the new Hondajet, a revolutionary plane that is, inevitably, already being called the ‘Civic of the Skies’.
At £ 4 million, it is rather more expensive than the company’ s bestseller, the £17,600 Honda Civic hatchback. But it’s a positive snip when compared to the Gulfstream G650, said to be the best jet £50 million can buy.
Despite the unlikely brand name, Japanese giant Honda, which makes everything from lawnmowers to motorbikes and engines for Formula 1 racing cars, is so serious about aviation it has spent an estimated £ 1.6 billion and 30 years developing its first small jet.
Despite the hefty pricetag, five British customers have already put down deposits for a plane which has been hailed as ‘one of the most creative designs in the history of aviation’.
So far, just one of them has landed in the UK – and The Mail on Sunday was invited aboard to take it for an exclusive spin.
I don’t have a pilot’s licence, so my chauffeur for the day was Mike Finbow, demonstration pilot for Hondajet Europe.
In a trice we were speeding down the runway and airborne.
So what’s it like to fly one class above First Class?
Well, quite eerie is one answer. Despite its tiny size and the fact that it has two turbofan jet engines, each with 2,000lb of thrust on either side of your head, the Hondajet is unsettlingly smooth and quiet, even on take-off. At a fast, high-altitude cruise it’s serene. And as this is a private aircraft, you can keep using your phone until you fly too high to get a signal.
Most will have to crouch a little in the 5ft tall cabin, but you don’t have far to walk to your seat. There are precisi on- engineered f ol d- out tables and the seats slide inwards to create more space against the cabin wall for larger passengers.
At the back there’s a separate lavatory which, it turns out, is quite a blessing in the world of private planes. Some ‘very light jet’ (VLJ) rivals offer only an ‘emergency potty’ filled with cat litter and – if you’re lucky – a curtain to preserve your modesty. But because they add weight, a solid toilet door, washbasin with running water and ‘external servicing’ for the loo are optional extras: at £80,000 for all three.
Honda, you may recall, has a his
‘It’s a snip compared to a £50 million Gulfstream’
tory of rather eccentric innovations, including personal jetpacks and Asimo, the humanoid robot. But it is deadly serious in its aim to shake up the private aviation market.
The company’s innovative design looks a little strange, but it works superbly. It mounts its new, lowemission jet engines high above the wings, rather than below as on your common-or-garden Airbus or Boeing. This makes it up to 25 per cent faster and 17 per cent more fuelefficient and 20 per cent bigger inside than its older, slower rivals – huge advances in aviation terms.
The design also frees up interior space for that toilet and 400kg of luggage in a rear hold the size of a small van.
Like a hybrid-powered Honda car, the HondaJet claims to be highly efficient, clean – and in this case significantly cheaper to run than its rivals. The jet fuel for our 40-minute flight from Chester to Stansted with six people aboard cost just £150, or £25 a head – little more than two tanks of petrol for a Civic.
To that, you’ll need to add maintenance, hangar storage, landing fees and your pilot’s salary. Not that’s it’s unduly tricky to fly. The HondaJet uses the latest ‘glass cockpit’ system by American tech giant Garmin – effectively an aeronautical supersatnav – and has a higher level of automation than almost any other aircraft. ‘It’s like using an iPhone for the first time,’ said pilot Mike.
The company expects that many of its customers will employ a professional pilot for business trips, but fly themselves around at the weekend.
There is no cockpit door, which means they will be able to chat with family and friends.
Its range is about 1,400 miles – enough to fly from London to Malaga in a fraction over three hours.
Travelling across Britain by private jet feels more like teleportation than transportation. It’s a faster process on the ground too. There are private aviation terminals at all the major airports and dozens of smaller ones. Most allow you to park directly outside and walk through to your plane with no queues for security or ticket checks. Your plane leaves within minutes of you arriving at the airport.
The United States is by far the biggest market for private jets, with 61 per cent of global sales.
Sales have rebounded since the financial crisis, but despite making good business sense they are still held back by worries about the high cost of ownership and the negative image of private jets.
Honda is hoping to change that with its new jet, which was designed in Japan and is manufactured in Greensboro, North Carolina. The HondaJet should be cheaper to operate than its rivals. And Honda is hoping that a name more associated with affordable cars and motorbikes will make its private jet look a bit less arrogant.
For me, going back to easyJet, let alone the family hatchback, is not going to be easy.