Stupid Honda

Here's a pretty cheap lift from Reveries.com. But is was a perfect example of importance of "ignorance" in the creative process.

One of his bosses called him "the stupidest engineer I've ever met in my life," but that didn't stop Michimasa Fujino from pushing through a radical design idea that could hand Honda a quick 10 percent of the small-jet market, reports Norihiko Shirouzu in The Wall Street Journal (6/18/07). Michimasa's innovation -- the HondaJet -- puts "the engines above the wings" instead of under them "or on the rear of the fuselage." Conventional wisdom says engines above wings put a "drag on the plane," but Michimasa thought differently based on an "air-flow calculation" he discovered "in a 1930s aeronautics textbook."

Michimasa's design, as it turns out cruises "eight percent faster and can take off and land on shorter runways," than "the roughly similar Cessna Citation CJ1+ ... It is also a much more economical jet: The $3.65 million Honda plane uses about 22 percent less fuel than the Citation, flying, for instance, at 441 miles an hour and at altitude of 35,000 feet. It also has cabin space that is nearly 20 percent larger," and a cargo area that's 45 percent roomier than Citation's. "On top of all that, the Honda is priced $880,000 below the Cessna and boasts the fit and finish of a luxury car." So what if putting the engines over the wings looks a little scary?

Michimasa prevailed by convincing Honda's top management that this jet would be the flying equivalent of the Honda Civic and tapping into their desire to been seen as "innovative" by creating something other than an "ordinary" airplane. The HondaJet is now expected to be on the market "in about three years" -- more than 20 years after Michimasa began developing it. He comments: "A lot of companies try to cut into the small jet business, but most of them ... repeat the same mistakes. If Honda had done it the same way and did not learn all the skills and technologies involved from scratch, we couldn't have come up with the design we have today."