Gregory Polek has spent his entire career in aviation journalism with AIN, starting as a proofreader and assistant to then-managing editor Mary Mahoney in 1995 after serving an internship with&nbsp;New Jersey Monthly&nbsp;magazine and completing his B.A. degree in English/Writing at New Jersey’s William Paterson College. By 1997 Polek accepted a position as an associate editor, covering the regional airline beat for&nbsp;Aviation International News&nbsp;in place of retiring industry veteran Don Anderson. The assignment took Polek across North America and Europe to profile regional airlines varying in size and mission from the likes of floatplane operators Kenmore Air and Chalk’s Ocean Airways to regional jet operators such as SkyWest and American Eagle. Today, in his dual role as Air Transport Editor and International Airshow Editor, Polek writes, edits, and manages AIN’s commercial aviation content while overseeing each of the company’s daily international air show publications in Paris, Farnborough, Singapore, and Dubai. Most recently Polek has assumed oversight of daily coverage of the Helicopter Association International’s annual Heli-Expo convention.

Senior Editor

Gregory Polek

If Pratt &amp; Whitney executives felt discouraged by Mitsubishi Aircraft’s recent announcement that it would <a href="http://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/ain-air-transport-perspective/2012-02-15/mitsubishi-mrj-program-face-fresh-delay">delay first flight</a> and, likely, certification of the MRJ regional jet by a year-and-a-half, they didn’t show it last week after the airplane’s PW1217G geared turbofan flew for the first time on April 30 aboard Pratt’s Boeing 747SP test bed. In fact, the delay will not affect the PW1217G’s initial flight-test schedule, said next-generation product family v-p Bob Saia, as Pratt &amp; Whitney continues to eye certification by early next year.


During the four-hour 40-minute first flight, the 15-person crew began the process of validating performance marks established during some 1,000 hours of ground testing with the program’s first four test articles. Over the next four to five weeks, Pratt &amp; Whitney plans to conduct some 60 hours of flight testing on the engine, attached to a stub wing that protrudes from the upper front section of the 747SP’s fuselage.


Pratt &amp; Whitney flew the 747 from its base at Montreal Mirabel, Canada, to Hartford, Connecticut’s Bradley International Airport for its annual “Media Day,” during which it hosted several reporters for a round of interviews and factory tours. Mitsubishi Aircraft executives who made the trip to Hartford last week expressed satisfaction with the PW1217G’s progress, and insisted that the delay to the MRJ program in no way involved the engine.


Rather, explained Mitsubishi Aircraft marketing director Yugo Fukuhara, the reasons center primarily on Mitsubishi Heavy Industries' failure to properly document engineering and production processes.


The program’s rather abrupt interruption came at the behest of the Japan Civil Aviation Bureau (JCAB), which, in concert with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), carries responsibility for issuing type and production certification for the airplane.


Since the JCAB intervened, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) has had to remanufacture virtually all the parts for the first prototype, explained Fukuhara. The company has now begun refabricating the large structural components, most notably the forward part of the fuselage.&nbsp;


“Sometimes our workers improve fabrication processes to improve efficiency,” said Fukuhara. “But we didn’t update the documents. So some processes are different from [what appears in] the documents…We are almost completed with the [documentation] process.”


Second, said Fukuhara, the company needs to produce more documentation of the actual process of testing and analysis used for type certification compliance. “We didn’t think [we would need] so many documents, not only [related to] the technology itself, but also the processes,” he added. “It took a longer time than expected.”


The new program schedule calls for the first MRJ to fly some time during next year’s fourth quarter. As a result, the 92-seat MRJ90—the larger of a pair of models under development and the first scheduled for introduction—will not reach the market until the summer “or later half” of the 2015 Japanese fiscal year, which runs from April 1, 2015 to March 31, 2016.

MRJ Delays Fail To Dampen Pratt’s Celebration of PW1217G First Flight

Pratt & Whitney flew the PW1217G for the first time on April 30.

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