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When our story begins, Japan was no longer in the ascendency in the Pacific war. America had entered the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and was fighting Japanese forces with its allies all over the Pacific.

Its once-impressive naval force was getting regularly thumped by Allied forces,

And Even Japan’s merchant fleet was under constant threat of attack from Allied forces.

This had dire consequences for Japan since it meant that supplies and manpower could not be easily replenished between the various islands it occupied throughout the Asia Pacific region

The war in the Pacific was also huge in scale, with much of it on remote, far-flung islands.

The war had become nothing short of a logistical nightmare for the Empire.

And so it was in 1943 that the Imperial Japanese Navy instructed the Kawanishi plant to build a solution to this problem

The plane would have to transport up to 1000 soldiers or Imperial Marines at a time, with all their equipment included.

Importantly, the plane was to be capable of being deployed anywhere in the Pacific region.

For just a little context, comparing the KX-3 to the Hughes H-4 Hercules built in 1947, Commonly and famously known as the ‘Spruce Goose,’ it’s obvious that the KX-3 was over 2 times larger in both length and wingspan.

A more modern seaplane/flying boat comparison might be the Soviet ‘Caspian Sea Monster’. Well, even that huge plane doesn’t come close in any metric to the sheer massiveness of the Kawanishi KX-3.

Appropriately, think Godzilla when thinking of the Kawanishi KX-3!

But making this insane dream a reality would be A Herculean Design and Engineering Task,

The most obvious design and technical feat that the Kawanishi engineers had to overcome with the KX-3 was also very simple:

how does one get such a huge plane into the sky and able to fly under its own power?

However, the team of engineers had no choice but to take up the challenge foisted on them by the imperial government.

Development work was expedited by the Kawanishi team using the company's own proven H8K flying boat or ‘Emily’ as the starting point.

The logic was simple: keep all of Emily’s dimensions and simply enlarge them all until it morphed into the gigantic KX-3.

This meant that the KX-3 would have a boat-like hull for water-borne take-offs and landings.

The hull would have had a wide-spanning wing main-plane to match. This design factor would be ultra-critical in ensuring that the huge plane had lift and drag as needed.

Also, long-running flaps would be affixed to the trailing edges of both wing members for added lift and drag capabilities.

The fuselage had slab sides and a rounded dorsal surface for aerodynamic maximization, as well as outboard sponsons or projections from the side of the plane that could support the plane’s massive appendages near its midway points.

The tail unit at the extreme end of the fuselage would feature a pair of high-reaching vertical fins for control and added stability.

Details regarding what horsepower would have supplied the KX-3 have differed over the years, with one theory being that the Rikugun Kokugijutsu
Kenkyuuju (RKK) 12 Ne201 turboprop engines would have amounted to about 132,000 horsepower.

Each engine would have driven multi-blade propeller units in puller fashion, augmented by a further four to six Mitsubishi Ne 330 turbojet engines.

By the way, that turbojet technology would have been made available courtesy of Nazi Germany's BMW company. Yes the same one that would later go on to make cars.

The aircraft would have required a crew of 24 men with its range on a full load being 18,520 kilometres or 11,507 miles.

Its top speed would have been approximately 345 knots, with a stall speed of 120 knots.