Talk:Japanese military aircraft designation systems

Robert Beechy hosted references

I removed a list of Robert Beechy hosted references based on this URL: http://hud607.fire.prohosting.com/uncommon/reference/japan/. The references are self-published and therefore not reliable sources. Binksternet (talk) 19:17, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

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Anybody know how the Japanese tail number system works?

. 66.186.231.122 (talk) 17:34, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

The Army used symbols, letters or heraldic devices to represent units.

From what I have figured out, the Navy was more systemic and most operational aircraft had a symbol, number or character representing the unit, or several followed by a numeral of up to three digits for the individual aircraft. These changed over time, especially the unit numbers, which rarely matched the actual unit number. In several cases, the unit name inspired the choice, so it may have used either a roman or Japanese character to represent that - T for Takao Kokutai and K for Kanoya Kokutai for instance, both on G4Ms. A few late war units (15 on N1K2-J, ) had the unit's chosen number on the fuselage roundel. Trainers were often attached to operational units, but dedicated training units existed, with their own unique symbols - I have seen ケ, ツ, and カ as well as others, while the submarine-based E14Y aircraft most often had イ, matching the symbol used to designate submarines.

If it was a prototype or aircraft undergoing tests, the first character was usually コ (meaning research) followed by the type and model number as two characters, and an aircraft number, as in コ-G6-6 for a G6M prototype, コ-DY-29 for a D4Y prototype (gotta have a weird one), コ-K10-4 for a K10W1 prototype, コ-Q1-4 for a Q1W prototype, etc, and a captured Douglas DB-7 received a similar marking, although most evaluation aircraft were simply disassembled and studied for specific technical details.

Carrier based aircraft added a number to the unit symbol, which tied the aircraft to a specific ship. AI-218 was a D3A from the Akagi, EI-288 was a D3A from Shokaku and BII-213 was a D3A from Hiryu.

Unfortunately it is a case of looking up the symbols on each aircraft to determine the unit. Hyphens were sometimes omitted, blurring the unit number into the aircraft number as well. This is all I have - not enough to start a paragraph yet though, and without decent references explicitly on them - all the sources I have are ancient and have obvious errors. - NiD.29 (talk) 22:47, 23 December 2021 (UTC)