The $9 Billion Japanese Jet That NEVER Carried a Single Passenger

November 11, 2015. Mitsubishi’s first commercial jetliner finally lifts off for its maiden test flight from Nagoya Airport, flanked by three Japanese military chase planes. After years of troubled development and production delays, Japan had finally done it. Japanese engineers could finally breathe a sigh of relief. After all, now all that was left was to certify the jet and deliver those 400 jets on the order books. Everyone assumed the hard part was over. At least that's what they thought. Because just seven years later, every single one of those test aircraft would be ordered Dismantled, and Mitsubishi ended up scrapping the Entire program. But here's what makes this story genuinely baffling. Mitsubishi wasn't some startup chasing a dream. This is the company that builds almost thirty-five percent of EVERY Boeing 787 Dreamliner, including the Wings. One of the most structurally demanding and complex component on the entire aircraft. And it wasn't even like they were entering a highly competitive market. In fact, they were entering a market Boeing and Airbus had basically abandoned, which was worth over one hundred billion dollars. And most importantly, they had the backing of the Japanese government. Yet somehow, after twelve years of development and spending a massive 9 billion dollars, they ended up with absolutely nothing. So what went wrong? This is the story of Japan's greatest aviation ambition, and the catastrophic miscalculation that destroyed it.