Yokosuka E6Y
Japanese reconnaissance aircraft
The Yokosuka E6Y (long designation: Yokosuka Navy Type 91-1 Reconnaissance Seaplane (九一式水上偵察機)) was a Japanese submarine-based reconnaissance seaplane developed at the Yokosuka Naval Air Technical Arsenal for the Imperial Japanese Navy during the 1920s. The prototype first flew as the Yokosho 2-Go (long designation: Yokosuka Arsenal No. 2 Reconnaissance Seaplane (横廠式二号水上偵察機)) in 1929.
The aircraft was a single-seat biplane that could be quickly assembled and disassembled so that it could be stored on board a submarine. Two prototypes were built that differed in power plant and design details. Eight production machines followed with the designation E6Y built by Kawanishi in the 1930s and served with the Japanese submarine aircraft carriers I-5, I-6, I-7 and I-8. They saw limited action during the January 28 incident and the Second Sino-Japanese War, the last example being retired in 1943.
Development
The Imperial Japanese Navy was a pioneer in naval aviation, starting as early as 1912 with the purchase of two floatplanes from Britain and one from the United States. By December 1922, Japan had completed Hōshō, which vies with Hermes as the first ship purpose-designed for aircraft operations. Alongside that development, the Navy also looked at aircraft as a way to extend the operational reach of their large submarine force.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Yokosuka E6Y” is japanese reconnaissance aircraft. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Yokosuka, Japanese and reconnaissance, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Yokosuka E6Y” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.