Kamikaze (1937 aircraft)

Kamikaze
The Kamikaze-go
Type	Mitsubishi Ki-15
Manufacturer	Mitsubishi
Registration	J-BAAI
Fate	Destroyed

Kamikaze (神風号, Kamikaze-gō^?) was a Mitsubishi Ki-15 Karigane aircraft, (registration J-BAAI) sponsored by the newspaper Asahi Shimbun. It became famous on April 9, 1937, as the first Japanese-built aircraft to fly from Japan to Europe. The flight from Tokyo to London took 51 hours, 17 minutes and 23 seconds and was piloted by Masaaki Iinuma (1912–1941), with Kenji Tsukagoshi (1900–1943) serving as navigator.

In the 1930s, as the performance of aircraft was rapidly improving, air races and the setting of long distance flight records was very popular in Europe and North America, and were often used as publicity stunts by newspapers. A French newspaper offered a substantial monetary prize for the first aircraft to fly between Paris and Tokyo within 100 hours. Many aviators had failed in the attempt, including André Japy, the French aviator whose plane crashed into the mountains of Kyūshū on the last leg of his record attempt from Paris to Tokyo.

In the 1930s, Japanese aircraft designers had made maximizing the range of their aircraft a high priority, in order to link the Japanese home islands with the Empire of Japan's overseas possessions in Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria and the South Pacific Mandate. Long range capabilities also had implications for the development of military aircraft for future conflicts in China and over the Pacific Ocean - potential war theatres which offered few airfields for aircraft to refuel.

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