Honda Motor's ambitious effort to create an aircraft company from nothing at all has paid off recently. In fact, the car and bike maker has actually reached two aviation milestones. Firstly, its small business jet was certified to fly in Honda’s home country of Japan, and secondly, the company handed over the HondaJet to its first Japanese customer at the firm’s factory in North Carolina, according to a Forbes report.

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Michimasa Fujino, the engineer behind Honda Aircraft Co., was given the honour to hand over HondaJet to his first Japanese customer. The company’s factory is based in North Carolina, where it’s been making planes since 2015, primarily for the US market. This Honda airplane is indeed amazing! It has the engines on top of the wings rather that the orthodox fashion that all other planemakers have adopted of putting them under. Over-the-wing engine mount adds a number of benefits for owners among them being increases passenger space, cargo space and performance.

According to the report, output of the HondaJet has slowed significantly this year due to the company’s decision to sell the plane through a dealership network in the United States rather than hire its own sales force.

Michimasa Fujino reportedly stands by the dealership approach and believes there's potential to generate significant sales in Japan and China, where certification is expected in 2019. "There are many opportunities in Asia," he said in a telephone interview with Forbes.

Favouring dealership model to have given HondaJet strong geographic coverage, Fujino told Forbes, “Our extensive dealer network ensures that the service and support needed by our customers is rarely more than 90 minutes away. …[We] believe this model provides HondaJet owners with the best possible ownership experience.”

Notably, after decades of stop-and-start R&D going back to 1986, Honda became one of only a few successful new entrants in the jet market in the past 50 years. It stands alone as the sole aircraft maker that produces its own engines. 

Watch this Youtube video on HondaJet

For that, large credit goes to its CEO, Fujino, who toiled for years to come up with technology that would distinguish it from the incumbents, eventually landing in the late 1990s on an unusual engine-over-wing design, the report added.