Kamikaze (1937 aircraft)

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This page is about a Mitsubishi Ki-15 aircraft. For the suicide attacks, made by Japanese pilots and submariners during World War II, see Kamikaze

The Kamikaze was a Mitsubishi Ki-15 aircraft (registration J-BAAI) sponsored by the newspaper Asahi Shimbun, which became famous on April 9, 1937, when it arrived at Croydon Airport in London. It was the first Japanese-built aircraft to fly to Europe. The flight from Tokyo to London took 51 hours, 17 minutes and 23 seconds and was piloted by Masaaki Iinuma, with Kenji Tsukagoshi serving as navigator.

The arrival of the Kamikaze caused a sensation in the Western world. Several years earlier, a prize had been offered for the first flight between Paris and Tokyo within less than 100 hours. Many European aviators had failed at this challenge, and one year before the flight of the Kamikaze, a French pilot attempting the challenge was killed when his aircraft crashed into a mountain on Kyushu.

Racism was still very prevalent in the West in 1937, and the Japanese achievement thus stunned many observers who believed that the Japanese people did not have adequate vision for the purposes of flying aircraft. Some observers even speculated that Masaaki Iinuma could not be genuinely Japanese, but was of mixed, partially Mediterranean descent.

Japanese aircraft designers had made maximizing the range of their aircraft a high priority, in order to link Japan proper with its possessions in Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria and Micronesia, and also with a view to developing military aircraft for future conflicts in China and over the Pacific Ocean - war theatres which offered few airfields for aircraft to refuel.

Kamikaze's pilot, Masaaki Iinuma, was later killed in action in the Pacific War in December 1941. He was 29 years old.

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