Ever heard of these insane submarines?
The Japanese built huge submarines in WWII. They could actually carry fighter planes!
I-400 submarine
Related Questions
Did submarines ever carry aircraft?
Yes. Several navies built submarines that carried aircraft in watertight hangars. The most famous were Japan's enormous I-400-class submarines of World War II, which could each carry and launch folding-wing floatplane bombers, making them among the largest submarines built before the nuclear age.
What was the Japanese I-400 submarine?
The I-400 was a class of Imperial Japanese Navy submarine aircraft carriers built during World War II. Each carried folding-wing floatplane bombers in a waterproof hangar and launched them via catapult for long-range strike missions. They were the largest submarines built until the 1960s.
How many aircraft could the I-400 carry?
Each I-400-class submarine could carry up to three folding-wing floatplane bombers (the Aichi M6A Seiran), stowed inside a large waterproof deck hangar and launched by catapult. This gave the submarine a unique long-range aerial strike capability unmatched by other navies.
Why were submarine aircraft carriers abandoned?
Submarine aircraft carriers were abandoned because launching and recovering aircraft left the submarine dangerously exposed on the surface, and advances in carrier aviation and missiles made the concept obsolete. They remain among the most unusual experiments in naval and aviation history.
What other strange aircraft have been built?
Aviation history is full of unusual designs, from flying saucers and tailless jets to oblique-wing aircraft and submarine-launched bombers. Many never went beyond the prototype stage but pushed aviation technology forward. See more of the strangest aircraft ever built.
Awesome engineering by the Japanese but too late to proved their worth
That is one bad ass submarine and a great feat of engineering by the Japanese. Like the other commenter said its great but quite late.
The video doesn’t work anymore, but if they’re talking about the B1 type sub those were active since before Pearl Harbor and actually did prove their worth.
One of their onboard planes did a night-time flyover of Pearl before the bombing and the sub served as a radio relay for the fleet. They preyed on shipping all over the Atlantic. I-15 sank the USS Wasp and USS Obrien (and wounded the North Carolina) in a single 6-torpedo spread. I-25 conducted one of the only Continental US coastal bombardments of the war, and its onboard seaplane conducted the only Continental US aerial bombing of the entire war.
By the end of the war they’d stripped the planes out to accomodate manned suicide torpedoes, but they were a part of pretty much the entire conflict.
You think that is big, there is a Goliath sub (quite literally) that had the storage space for 3 Japanese zeros. It was a bit bigger I think. XD