COBI Kawasaki Ki-61-I Hien 'Tony' Set 5740

COBI's Kawasaki Ki-61-I Hien is a 1:32 model built from 324 blocks, 29 cm long with a 38.5 cm wingspan. The propeller and ailerons move, the wheels retract on rubber tires, and the canopy opens for the pilot figure with his headband. A display stand and a nameplate are included.

The Allies thought it was Italian

Every Japanese fighter the Allies had met had a radial engine — a short, blunt nose with cylinders arranged in a circle. The Ki-61 had a long, pointed nose, because it had an inline liquid-cooled engine, and Allied intelligence concluded it must be a foreign design.

They guessed Italian, and the Allied reporting name system gave Italian-looking aircraft Italian first names. So the Hien became Tony, and the name stuck for the rest of the war.

They were half right. The engine was German: a Daimler-Benz DB 601, the same unit that powered the Bf 109, built under licence in Japan as the Ha-40. Kawasaki had designed the airframe itself.

The licence turned out to be the aircraft's weakness. The DB 601 needed manufacturing tolerances Japanese industry struggled to hold, and the Ha-40 was chronically unreliable — engines failed, and airframes piled up at the factory with nothing to put in them. Around 3,000 were built, and Hien means flying swallow.

Specifications

Pieces: 324 · Figures: 1 pilot · Scale: 1:32
Model dimensions: 29 × 38.5 × 11 cm (11.4 × 15.2 × 4.3 in)