In 1934, the Imperial Japanese Navy issued a specification for a night reconnaissance aircraft, intended to shadow enemy ships at night, allowing submarines to be directed to their targets and, in a surface action, to spot for the guns of the fleet. This concept had been tested with the
Aichi Experimental 6-Shi Night Reconnaissance Flying boat, which had proved unsuitable for service use. The aircraft was required to have good endurance and slow speed stability to help its crews in flying long missions at night, while it also needed to be suitable for catapulting from warships. Contracts were awarded to both
Aichi and
Kawanishi to design and build prototypes to meet the requirement. Kawanishi's design, with the company designation
Kawanishi Type T was a single-engined
tractor configuration biplane of all-metal construction. Its
single-bay wings, which folded backwards for storage on ship, were based on those of the
Kawanishi E7K reconnaissance
floatplane, while the
Nakajima Kotobuki radial engine was mounted forward of the top wing. The stressed-skin hull held a crew of three, with pilot and co-pilot sitting in an enclosed cockpit, while the gunner/observer sat in the nose, armed with a single flexibly mounted machine gun. ==Operational history==