Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has been developing the Spacejet for many years, but so far not a single copy has been delivered. The program, which has been on hold for some time, will now be finally discontinued. The extent to which customers will be compensated for around 270 orders is still completely open.

The Spacejet was launched as an ambitious project for Japanese aviation and should lead to it being able to compete internationally again. Apart from larger orders, which could be landed from All Nippon Airways and a US regional airline, the new development was never a big seller. The acquisition of Bombardier's CRJ program was supposed to change this, but the hopes of the Japanese were not fulfilled in this context either.

Towards the beginning of the corona pandemic, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries decided to put the Spacejet project on hold indefinitely. All test flights were stopped and a decision was to be made at a later date about a possible continuation. That has now been done, but the program is being abandoned. Over nearly 15 years, MHI spent approximately $7,6 billion on the spacejet, which was never delivered to customers.

Originally designated as the Mitsubishi Regional Jet, it was in direct competition with the Embraer E-Jet series and the Airbus A220 family. However, there were problems right from the start, because the space jet should have been handed over to the first customer ANA long ago. It never happened because of years of delays and it never will because the program just ended. In a way, of course, it is also a loss of face for the Japanese aviation industry, but it can be assumed that MHI will have done the math and come to the conclusion that it is almost impossible to break even with the current advance orders. Apart from a few prototypes, no commercial customer copy was ever made. The Spacejet thus joins the long list of unrealized aviation projects.