Although pilot union scope clauses at mainline U.S. airlines continue to restrict regional partners from flying airplanes that hold more than 76 seats and carry a maximum takeoff weight of more than 86,000 pounds, Mitsubishi Aircraft sees North America as its “biggest and most important” market, the company’s vice president of sales and marketing, Yugo Fukuhara, told a gathering of reporters at the Regional Airline Association convention in Cleveland Tuesday. Holding orders for 170 airplanes from three airlines in the U.S., Mitsubishi traces well over three quarters of its order intake from the country’s regional airlines. While one might consider such an imbalance risky, Fukuhara expressed confidence that, in fact, scope clauses would loosen to allow for the larger of the two MRJs—the MRJ90—to fly with the likes of Skywest and Trans States Airlines. If the major partners don’t manage to negotiate scope clause revisions, said Fukuhara, Mitsubishi fully expects to deliver MRJ70s instead, likely in a dual-class, 70-seat configuration.
“We understood scope clauses at the beginning of the program,” he explained. “This is why we offered the MRJ70 and MRJ90...A maximum weight of 86,000 pounds will not limit the range of the MRJ70. So it will be a marketable airplane under the current scope clause. Without any relaxation of scope clauses, no regional carrier in the U.S. can enjoy next-generation aircraft, including the [Embraer] E-Jet E2...So we are very confident in the future [scope clause relief] will come.”
Although in April it announced a delay to first flight from this spring to September or October, Mitsubishi continues to cite a second-quarter 2017 first delivery target. The company has fully assembled its first two flight-test airplanes. Plans call for the first flying prototype to perform envelope expansion and systems tests, the second to carry out performance and function tests, the third to evaluate detailed flight characteristics and avionics tests, the fourth to perform interior, community noise and icing tests and the fifth to assess autopilot function.
The company plans to carry out much of its flight testing at Grant County Airport in Moses Lake, Washington, to take advantage of its long runways and lack of regularly scheduled airline service. Other testing sites in the U.S. include Gunnison-Crested Butte Regional Airport in Colorado, where the company plans to conduct high-altitude takeoff and landing tests. Meanwhile, it has chosen Roswell International Air Center in New Mexico for special runway tests and McKinley Climatic Laboratory in Florida for extreme environment testing.
It also plans to employ 150 engineers at a new engineering center in Seattle to support all the testing activity in the U.S.
