Aircraft
Mitsubishi homes in on design freeze for MRJ
Engineers and designers in Nagoya, Japan, have kept busy over the past year redrawing parts of the nascent Mitsubishi MRJ regional jet to satisfy the evo

Engineers and designers in Nagoya, Japan, have kept busy over the past year redrawing parts of the nascent Mitsubishi MRJ regional jet to satisfy the evolving desires of potential and existing airline customers. However, in the expectation that they will freeze the airplane’s design in the third quarter of 2010, the development team knows that the time for major changes has passed.

“What we are doing now is the detailed design, so if you look at the airplane from the outside almost nothing will be changed,” Mitsubishi Aircraft executive vice president Junichi Miyakawa told AIN. The company has frozen all the interfaces between the various systems, he explained, leaving only the elemental details within each system to settle on. Still, “we might–we might–have to come back to the interfaces [depending on] the detailed design results,” said Miyakawa.