Honda Aircraft Co. Gave Insufficient Notice to Run Plane Engines for 15 Min. If Not In Use for 90 Days, Class Action Argues

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A proposed class action alleges Honda Aircraft Company failed to provide HondaJet owners and operators with sufficient notice that the airplanes’ engines must be run for 15 minutes every 90 days during non-flight periods or else undergo tedious and costly maintenance. 

The 17-page lawsuit, filed in Texas on August 12, centers on Honda Aircraft Company’s April 2020 advisement to HondaJet owners and operators that the plane’s engine should be fired up and run for 15 minutes every 90 days if the aircraft was not being flown during that period. The notice to HondaJet owners came at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Honda Aircraft Company came to realize that HondaJet owners and operators may not be flying their aircraft with the same regularity as prior to the global health crisis, the complaint relays. 

More specifically, HondaJet owners and operators, the suit says, were informed that all engines not run during a 90-day period had to be removed from their aircraft and disassembled to look for corrosion, a process that the lawsuit states costs an estimated $700,000 per engine pair. Moreover, each HondaJet engine disassembly, inspection and repair had to be done at one of Honda Aircraft Company’s approved facilities, rather than any regional certified service center, despite the company’s advertisement that it offers service and repairs 24 hours per day, seven days per week when such is required and that its engines have a 5,000-hour time before overhaul rating, according to the complaint. 

The plaintiffs, who claim in the suit to not have come across the defendant’s 15-minute engine-running requirement until June 2021, more than a year after it was initially disseminated, contend that there is “no mention of this purportedly recent recommendation to run the engines or the consequences of not doing so” on Honda Aircraft Company’s website, in communications with owners and operators in an appropriate forum, or in any communication from the dealers who sold the aircraft to proposed class members. 

“There is no such recommendation in any sales or training literature disseminated to Plaintiffs and the Class at the time of their purchase, or after,” the suit reads, claiming that even service letters sent by Honda Aircraft Company made no mention of the run-the-engines recommendation. 

According to the lawsuit, the plaintiffs are unaware of how many HondaJet owners and operators have yet to discover that operating the aircraft, if its engines are not run for at least 15 minutes every 90 days, “requires a substantial and costly inspection and repair process that requires a grounding of the aircraft until the same is complete, to ensure its safety and usage airworthiness.” Any notices sent by Honda Aircraft Company “certainly do not highlight or emphasize” the run-the-engine recommendation, the suit says. Rather, the recommendation, according to the plaintiffs, was buried deep in an April 2020 service letter, with the information relayed in “a manner that conceals, rather than makes apparent,” the 15-minutes-every-90-days process, the lawsuit shares. 

The case more importantly alleges that nowhere in that service letter was there mention of the fact that a failure to fulfill this “previously unidentified recommendation” would impair the safety, usage and airworthiness of the aircraft. 

By the time the plaintiffs came across the run-the-engines recommendation from Honda, they had already allowed their aircraft to sit for more than 90 days without running the engines for a 15-minute period, the suit says.

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