[UPDATE – see MRJ Update under downloads under Featured Downloads]
Today Mitsubishi announced its first flight plans for October – “Latter half of October 2015” is their language. The flight is planned for an hour. We are in an era where first flight dates are not announced this far ahead and with equally liquid time periods. MRJ must feel some confidence that they would even publish this – we have seen first flight windows announced a week ahead to media with no certainty whatsoever – a sort of “be here between day X and day Y”. To be fair OEMs planning such events have to contend with all sorts of variables – recall the CS300 first flight in February this year when the weather was predictably awfully cold and unsettled. But that’s Montreal weather for you.
MRJ is equally careful:
As Mitsubishi has discovered after three delays and first delivery to come four years late, this is an unforgiving business. It wisely has sought technical and marketing assistance from Boeing. It may need every bit of its deep pockets to stay in the business. Bombardier and Embraer will provide no welcome mat.
Your observations remind me of an occasion back in the late 1970s, when the international editor of a European weekly aviation journal greeted what we now have to call ‘breaking’ news of a military jet’s first flight with the wry comment: “That’s not bad — just 24hr later than they said it would be four days ago…” No, not the YF-16, which wasn’t intended to fly (but did so, I believe, to overcome some instability or oscillation during a fast taxy run…).
Pehaps other readers have other tales?