Kamikaze (1937 aircraft)

Kamikaze (Kamikaze-go in Japanese) was the second prototype of the Mitsubishi Ki-15 Karigane, a single-engine monoplane registered J-BAAI and sponsored by the newspaper Asahi Shimbun. On 9 April 1937, flown by the pilot Masaaki Iinuma with the navigator Kenji Tsukagoshi, it became the first Japanese-built aircraft to fly from Japan to Europe, covering 15,357 km from Tokyo to Croydon airport in London in roughly 51 hours of flying time, and winning the first Federation Aeronautique Internationale aviation record credited to Japan. The silver airframe was powered by a Nakajima Kotobuki radial engine of Japanese design. The flight celebrated the coronation of King George VI; afterwards the aircraft carried Prince Chichibu on a joy ride and filmed the coronation from the air before flying home. It later ditched off southern Taiwan, was recovered and was displayed at a memorial centre that was destroyed in the Second World War.