WOW464 – Mitsubishi Dinah

Description

The Mitsubishi Type 100 reconnaissance aircraft (Dinah as known by the Allies) was borne from a request by the Japanese army in December 1937 in their search for a replacement for the Mitsubishi Ki-15 observation aircraft.

The new design resulted in a twin engine low wing monoplane with a retractable undercarriage. The fuselage was extremely narrow in order to streamline the design and maximise speed, with the crew separated by a fuel tank placed in the middle of them. Further fuel tanks were situated in the thin wings, both inboard and outboard of the engines, giving a total fuel capacity of 1,490 litres (328 imperial gallons).

Initial tests showed the Dinah to be slower than the Army’s initial requirement of 600 KMPH, however as the type was still faster than the Army’s latest fighter, the Nakajima Ki-43 and the Navy’s A6 Zero, an initial production batch was ordered with improvements in speed requested.
During the early stages of the war the Dinah was immune to Allied fighter interception, but the army realised improvements would need to be made to outpace the Spitfire and Lightning. This was done by removing the rear defensive machine gun and replacing the engines with a more powerful variant. These final improvements made the Dinah a hard bird to kill and successes were few and far between for Allied pilots trying to down one.
As the war progressed some Dinah’s were converted to night-fighters with forward and upwards firing cannon in order to counter the B-29 Superfortress threat.

Something like 1700 Dinah’s were manufactured but with only one survives to this day and is on display in the UK at RAF Cosford. We have a total of 1 x Dinah available priced at $999 plus postage.

The K&C figures and TG accessories are shown for display purposes only and are not included.