Flying boats, then trucks

ShinMaywa’s roots lie in Kawanishi, the wartime builder of the H6K and H8K flying boats and the Shiden-Kai fighter. When Japan surrendered in 1945, aircraft manufacture was banned outright. Kawanishi started making three-wheeled trucks in 1946, renamed itself Meiwa in 1947, and in 1949, under postwar corporate-reconstruction law, was split in two; the general machinery half became Shin Meiwa, the present company. When the Korean War brought the ban’s end, it came back to aviation modestly, overhauling aircraft such as the US Navy’s P5M Marlin flying boats, making drop tanks, licence-building the de Havilland Heron and taking a share of the YS-11 airliner.

A borrowed Albatross

Its chief designer Shizo Kikuhara and founder Ryuzo Kawanishi wanted more. In the early 1950s Kikuhara led a committee to design a seaplane that could alight on the open ocean, shrugging off waves and spray. By 1961 he was lobbying Japan’s Defense Agency for an anti-submarine flying boat, with support from the US Navy, which wanted help tracking Soviet submarines in the Pacific. The Americans supplied a Grumman HU-16 Albatross, which Shin Meiwa rebuilt as the UF-XS with boundary-layer control for very short take-offs, driven by a gas turbine inside the hull. It first flew on 20 December 1962.

PS-1: landing in four-metre waves

In 1966 the Maritime Self-Defense Force ordered prototypes, the PX-S, which first flew in 1967. In tests in the Kii Channel in 1968 it landed amid four-metre waves, beyond its own three-metre design goal. The navy ordered 21 production aircraft as the PS-1 in 1969. It was politically controversial, with a high unit cost from its short run, and it had to land to use its dipping sonar. Three fatal crashes between 1978 and 1984 killed 36 people. In September 1980 further orders and a successor were cancelled, as land-based P-3C Orions took over the mission.

US-1A and 550 lives

The navy then asked for a rescue version. Stripped of anti-submarine gear and fitted with wheels, more fuel and rescue equipment, the US-1A first flew on 15 October 1974 and was Japan’s first true amphibian, able to hand survivors straight to an ambulance on land. Between 1976 and 1999 the fleet made more than 500 rescues and saved 550 lives. Nineteen or twenty were bought, depending on the source; Japanese records give the last, the 20th, as delivered on 22 February 2005. The company, meanwhile, renamed itself ShinMaywa in 1992, reportedly to make the name easier for foreigners to pronounce.

US-2, and the Boeing connection

Unable to fund an all-new aircraft, the navy had ShinMaywa modernise the US-1A, with a pressurised hull and Rolls-Royce AE 2100 turboprops. The result, the US-2, first flew on 18 December 2003, and six had been delivered by November 2018; it can land in three-metre seas and has been offered as a firebomber carrying 15 tonnes of water. India studied buying 12 to 18, which would have been Japan’s first postwar arms sale to India, but the deal stalled. Today aircraft are a small part of ShinMaywa, which also makes dump trucks, refuse trucks, car parks and airport boarding bridges, and builds wing-to-body fairings for the Boeing 777 and 777X and spars for the 787.

Továrny

• Tokushima plant · Tokushima — Aircraft modification work
• Takarazuka headquarters · Takarazuka, Hyōgo — Head office

Lidé

• Shizo Kikuhara · chief aircraft designer — Led the open-ocean flying-boat effort that produced the PS-1
• Ryuzo Kawanishi · founder — Backed the return to large aircraft

Rekordy a prvenství

• PX-S landed in four-metre waves in the Kii Channel, 1968, exceeding its design goal
• US-1A: Japan’s first amphibian