MRJ forced to abort US ferry attempt twice

Mitsubishi has been planning to bring four MRJ aircraft to the US for over a year, to do flight testing and certification. They even built a 65,000 square foot hangar at the Moses Lake airport in Washington to house them.

The first attempts at bringing the aircraft to the US have not gone well however. The aircraft departed Nagoya Saturday afternoon on the first leg of the trip (Nagoya to Hokkaido to Russia), and was forced to abort the flight after about an hour, when the air management system shut down automatically. The aircraft returned to Nagoya for repairs.

Sunday they attempted the flight again, after engineers found a bad sensor and replaced it. A little over two hours into the flight, a similar problem cropped up, although this time the system didn't shut down. The crew decided to return to Nagoya to allow engineers to look deeper into the problem before continuing.

www.flightglobal.com...

Much bowing and appolagies on the cards then or some rather heated emails to Chinese hardware suppliers?

a reply to: Blackfinger

No, the supplier is in Washington. UTC Aerospace supplied environmental systems.

It looks like the first aircraft may not arrive until late September now. Their clearance to overfly Russia has expired and it will take two weeks or more to get new clearance. They're studying the possibility of a Guam to Hawaii to Washington route, as that would only require US approval.