The HondaJet made it's world debut at EAA Airventure on 7/28/05. The aircraft arrived at about 1000 AM CDT without much fanfare (no flybys) because of all the other air traffic swaming around. It taxied into position at the center of the show and shortly after it's arrival, the head of US marketing for Honda spoke to the crowd, followed by the aircraft's chief designer, Michimasa Fujino.

There must have been 20 to 30 HondaJet staff on site to support the debut, and lots of PR type stuff, still photos and video being taken by some of the staff. Mr. Fujino conducted about a 1 hour presentation on design, development and testing of the aircraft at 1300 CDT. It was a very thorough presentation with many technical aspects discussed. This is a detail oriented development program, engineering first and marketing later (well just starting to ramp the hype machine now).

The aircraft departed at 1430 CDT and this time performed a moderate speed sideslip pass to display the unusual over/behind the wing engine mount and then a low speed pass with gear retracted followed by the final pass at relatively high speed.

Several observations from the day's events are:
1) The aircraft is remarkably quiet! Taxiing, takeoff and in flight the aircraft produced a very low noise signature...should not have trouble being used at small airports that might be concerned about jet noise.
2) This HondaJet was modeled not just for flight efficiency, but manufacturing efficiency as well. Should be easy to transition to certification.
3) GE/Honda Aero Engine folks were seen among the crowd. I think they would love to have this platform available for their new HF118-2 light turbine, even though they professionally deny any associations between the programs.
4) Not that I'm a betting man, but Honda seems to want to pursue this program and become a factor in the VLJ market. After seeing today's activities, I'm quite sure of that. This is not just a design study anymore imo.