Masayuki Kubo is in an enviable position for a Japanese aircraft engineer—and an unenviable one. He has been lucky enough to be chosen as Kawasaki’s chief designer in the program that has broken a three-decade drought in the development of large Japanese aircraft. But he has been perhaps too lucky, because the program made him responsible for developing not one but two large aircraft. Neither he nor his team had done even one before. Moreover, they had to develop both the XP-1 maritime patrol aircraft (MPA) and the C-X airlifter at the same time.

China looks certain to become one of the world’s biggest low-cost airline markets, even though its budget sector is puny and will stay that way until the government removes substantial obstacles, probably over the next decade. Economically and geographically, the country is prime budget airline territory. China now has an average income that is about typical of the Asian countries where low-cost carriers have boomed beyond expectation this decade.

The Japan Aircraft Development Corp. will give priority to a commercial version of the Kawasaki Heavy Industries C-X military airlifter over development of the YPX airliner. It is possible that the civil version of the twinjet C-X, which has not flown, would have a stretched fuselage.