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U.S. Army. Via ibiblio.org |
Mitsubishi Ki-51 "Sonia"
Crew |
2 in tandem cockpit | ||
Dimensions |
39'8" by 30'3" by
8'11" 12.09m by 9.22m by 2.72m |
||
Wing area | 259 square feet 24 square meters |
||
Weight |
4129-6415 lbs 18873-2910 kg |
||
Maximum speed |
263 mph at 9845
feet 423 km/h at 3000 meters |
||
Climb rate |
28 feet per second 8.5 meters per second |
||
Ceiling |
27,130 feet 8270 meters |
||
One 940 hp (700 kW) Type 99 Model 2 (Mitsubishi Ha-26-II) 14-cylinder radial engine driving a variable-pitch 3-bladed metal propeller | |||
Armament |
2 12.7mm Type 1
machine guns (wings) 1 7.7mm Type 89 machine gun (rear cockpit) |
||
External stores |
441 lbs (200 kg) of bombs normal 551 lbs (250 kg) of bombs as kamikaze |
||
Range |
660 miles 1060 km |
||
A total of 2385 aircraft as follows: | |||
Mitsubishi Jukogyo K.K. (Nagoya): | |||
12 prototypes and service trial aircraft by December
1939 |
|||
Tachikawa Dai-Ichi Rikugun Kokusho: | |||
913 production aircraft from July 1941 to July 1945 |
"Sonia" was a more successful
design than "Helen",
serving throughout the Pacific. Though
somewhat slow, it was unusually well protected for
a Japanese
design, was easily maintained, and was well-liked by its crews. It had
a good
rough-field
capability.
The design originated in December 1937 with a
specification issued to Mitsubishi for a ground attack aircraft based
on the Ki-30 "Ann". The Japanese Army
wanted a smaller aircraft capable of operating on short airstrips close
to the front. The design team shortened the cockpit and gave the rear
cockpit a limited set of instruments and controls. The bomb bay was
eliminated and the wings were lowered to permit a sturdier
undercarriage. A prototype was completed in June 1939 and, with
modifications to improve handling and the addition of 6 mm armor plating around the cockpit and
engine, the design went into production in January 1940.
The aircraft was designed so that the rear cockpit
instruments and controls could be replaced with camera equipment for photoreconnaissance.
"Sonia" was so well liked by its crews that a new
production line was set up as late as 1944 at Tachikawa First Air
Arsenal (Tachikawa
Dai-Ichi
Rikugun Kokusho). The aircraft was assigned to kamikaze missions in the
final months of the war, and a few relic aircraft were used by the Indonesian Air Force
against Dutch forces postwar.
An attempt to produce a more powerful version with retractable landing
gear in Manchuria came to
naught, but was discovered by Allied
intelligence, who assigned the
new aircraft the code name "Edna".
References
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