Review of "The Luckiest Kamikaze Pilot" Episode at The Infographics Show

By: Shane Lambert
Original time of writing: January 27th, 2025

"The Luckiest Kamikaze Pilot" is an episode on The Infographics Show that was published on January 26th, 2025. It tells the story of a WWII Japanese pilot who operated a Zero plane as part of Japan's air force. I didn't mind the episode, it was short (under 15 minutes), however, I was a little disappointed with it relative to other episodes on the YouTube channel.

Kamikaze fighters were pilots on suicide missions. Their job was to fly their planes into enemy ships with the hopes of sinking them. The strategy would be to trade one pilot and one plane for an entire ship in the enemy's fleet and any crew that would be part of the ship.

With this episode, I think The Infographics Show managed their audience's expectations wrong. When you look at the name of the episode, then you might expect a tale of a Kamikaze pilot who crashed his plane into an enemy's ship and somehow survived the crash. There's a little bit of clickbait in the title, I think. But what it tells the story of instead is a Kamikaze pilot whose missions were either abandoned or aborted time and time again simply due to chance events, like weather or inability to locate a target. In the end, his final mission is aborted at the buzzer, because Japan surrounded to the Americans just before taking off.

Exit link to The Infographics Show episode!

I did find that the pilot was mentioned in mainstream news in 2020 with a picture. I did not like the newspaper article but thought that some would want to see the pilot's picture.

It seems that he, Kazuo Odachi, published his memoirs of being a Kamikaze very late in life. An Internet search suggests that he is still alive as of the time of this article, aged 98 years old. He would be among a very small number of people still alive today who fought in WWII.

Star Tribune December 4th, 2020.

Plane Crash Documentary - What Happens When a 15-Year Old Pilots a Plane

By: Shane Lambert
Original time of writing: April 15th, 2022

I've taken a liking to plane-crash documentaries lately as a means of passing the time while I am on the treadmill or elliptical. I thought that fans of my blog might like these kinds of documentaries as well for the educational value.

Plane-crash documentaries often include forensic analysis of the factors that cause any kind of malfunction. No expenses are spared in these investigations so they certainly bring a lot to light. I thought that I would highlight the documentaries that I enjoyed the best because I think my readers will have an interest in forensics.

A Youtube account, known as "Wonder", has a good list of documentaries. One documentary titled "Disaster Of Aeroflot Flight 593 After Kid Disables Autopilot | Mayday | Wonder," tells the true story of a flight that went from Moscow bound for Hong Kong. The description of the 50-minute documentary is as follows:

"On 23 March 1994, Aeroflot Flight 593 stalls and crashes while en route to Hong Kong, killing all 75 people on board. The pilot's 15-year-old son accidentally disabled the autopilot while in the captain's seat, causing the aircraft to bank heavily to the right, inducing the stall."

What happened is truly outrageous as a perfectly operatable airplane went from normal to devastated in what appeared to be only a matter of minutes. The Youtube video is embedded below.