Kawasaki P-1
The Sub Hunter
“Japan built its own submarine hunter from a clean sheet.”
Kawasaki Heavy Industries · military
The Kawasaki P-1 is one of the only aircraft ever designed from scratch purely to hunt submarines. Where most nations convert airliners, Japan built a four-engine jet around the mission: a weapons bay, a magnetic anomaly detector in the tail, and sensors watching the Pacific for the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force.
The P-1 was the first production aircraft in the world to fly with fiber-optic flight controls — fly-by-light instead of fly-by-wire.
Four engines under a low wing with a long tail stinger — the magnetic anomaly detector. Japan only: if you catch one outside the western Pacific, it's on a very long deployment.
One might be overhead right now.
Bogey turns the The Sub Hunter from a dot in the sky into a card in your logbook.
