AP 118 · No. 11 Section II · Aircraft Plate 214 / 370

Plate 214 of 370 · Second World War · Interceptor (prototype)

Kyushu J7W1 Shinden

J7W1 Shinden first prototype, Mushiroda, August 1945, painted as The first Kyushu J7W1 Shinden as it stood at Mushiroda airfield near Fukuoka when Captain Masaoki Tsuruno flew it on 3, 6 and 9 August 1945: a single-seat canard interceptor with a Mitsubishi Ha-43 eighteen-cylinder radial mounted backwards in the rear fuselage, driving a six-bladed pusher propeller behind a cooling-air exit ring, swept main wings set well aft with a fin and rudder on each wing, small foreplanes on the long nose, a framed canopy and a tall tricycle undercarriage that holds the nose up, shown standing nose-high on its wheels with the gear down, as it was on every flight: dark green fuselage, fins and upper surfaces, light grey-green undersides to the wings and foreplanes, pale main-gear doors and plain red hinomaru on the fuselage sides only; the photographs are black and white, so the hues are the standard Navy ones (shape from the Japanese fuselage installation drawing and a three-view, checked against wartime photographs of this aircraft and the surviving fuselage).

3D model

Turn it over

A procedural model built in Blender from published dimensions, drawings and photographs, painted as The first Kyushu J7W1 Shinden as it stood at Mushiroda airfield near Fukuoka when Captain Masaoki Tsuruno flew it on 3, 6 and 9 August 1945: a single-seat canard interceptor with a Mitsubishi Ha-43 eighteen-cylinder radial mounted backwards in the rear fuselage, driving a six-bladed pusher propeller behind a cooling-air exit ring, swept main wings set well aft with a fin and rudder on each wing, small foreplanes on the long nose, a framed canopy and a tall tricycle undercarriage that holds the nose up, shown standing nose-high on its wheels with the gear down, as it was on every flight: dark green fuselage, fins and upper surfaces, light grey-green undersides to the wings and foreplanes, pale main-gear doors and plain red hinomaru on the fuselage sides only; the photographs are black and white, so the hues are the standard Navy ones (shape from the Japanese fuselage installation drawing and a three-view, checked against wartime photographs of this aircraft and the surviving fuselage). Drag to orbit, scroll or pinch to zoom · download .glb (776 KB)

Data plate

Specification

First flight, number built and top speed are for the whole family (J7W1); engine, crew and dimensions are for the J7W1 Shinden first prototype, Mushiroda, August 1945 modelled here.

History

The Shinden

By 1943 the Imperial Japanese Navy needed an interceptor fast enough to catch the American bombers it expected over Japan, and Captain Masaoki Tsuruno of its technical staff proposed an unusual answer: a canard, with small foreplanes on the nose, swept wings set far back with a fin on each, and the engine buried behind the pilot driving a pusher propeller at the tail. With the engine out of the way, the nose was free for four 30 mm cannon. The idea was first tried on a small wooden canard glider, the MXY6, and the Navy then gave the design of the full-sized fighter, the J7W1 Shinden (‘magnificent lightning’), to Kyushu Hikoki at Fukuoka, a firm with little experience of fighters, with Tsuruno attached to lead the work.

The Shinden used the Mitsubishi Ha-43 eighteen-cylinder radial of about 2,130 hp, mounted backwards in the rear fuselage and cooled by air drawn in through ducts beside the cockpit and blown out around the spinner. A long shaft drove a six-bladed propeller 3.4 m across, and the undercarriage had to be tall to keep it off the ground, with small castoring wheels under the fins to protect it on take-off. The Navy was confident enough to order it into production before it had flown, planning 150 aircraft a month at two factories, but bombing, a shortage of parts and trouble cooling the engine slowed the work, and the first prototype was not ready until the summer of 1945.

Tsuruno flew it himself from Mushiroda airfield near Fukuoka on 3 August 1945, and again on 6 and 9 August, about 45 minutes in all, with the undercarriage left down each time. The aircraft pulled strongly to one side from the propeller torque and the propeller shaft vibrated, but it flew. Six days after the last flight Japan surrendered. A second prototype was finished but never flew. The first was dismantled at the end of 1945 and shipped to the United States with some 145 other Japanese aircraft, but there is no record of it flying there. Its fuselage is held by the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. A jet version, the J7W2, was planned but never built.

This airframe

J7W1 Shinden first prototype, Mushiroda, August 1945

Prototype 1The airframe modelled

The first Shinden was completed by Kyushu Hikoki at Fukuoka in the summer of 1945 and flown three times from Mushiroda airfield by Captain Masaoki Tsuruno, on 3, 6 and 9 August 1945, with its undercarriage down on every flight. It was shipped to the United States at the end of 1945, and its fuselage is held by the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum; it is the only Shinden that flew. None is in a UK museum. The model shows it standing nose-high on its wheels as it was photographed on the airfield: dark green fuselage, fins and upper surfaces, light grey-green undersides to the wings and foreplanes, pale main-gear doors and plain red hinomaru on the fuselage sides only, with no codes, identification strips or wing hinomaru, since no photograph shows any. The four 30 mm cannon were not fitted for the trials, so only their troughs in the nose are shown. Its shape comes from the Japanese fuselage installation drawing and a three-view, checked against wartime and later photographs of this aircraft and the surviving fuselage. The photographs are black and white, so the green and grey are the standard Navy colours.

Where to see one

Not on charge

The fuselage of the first prototype, the only Shinden to fly, is held by the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in the United States.

All 370 plates

Profiles and models are procedural interpretations built in Blender from published dimensions, three-view drawings and photographs of each airframe. Treat the museum aircraft as the reference.