After a 15-year development program plagued with setbacks, Mitsubishi has finally thrown in the towel on its SpaceJet airliner project. The aircraft was aimed at the small single-aisle market now dominated by Embraer and Airbus, and the Japanese mega-company determined it was never going to make the kind of inroads it would need to make a go of it. The announcement was buried in financial reports and said the company was “unable to find sufficient business feasibility to resume development”
One of the main issues was that the program had suffered so many delays that the design was quite dated before it even got into service. Among those delays were fundamental issues involving airframe strength and wiring design. The company is not ruling out another stab at aircraft design. It says it may use the hard lessons learned from the SpaceJet to build a next-generation fighter.
