but the crew was aware of the hazards of the mission; they even had a personal dose of poison to kill themselves if forced down in enemy territory. The pilot was Juukou Nagatomo, the co-pilot was Hajime Kawasaki, Kenji Tsukagoshi and Noriyoshi Nagata were flight engineers, and Motohiko Kawashima was the radio operator. Three Army officers were also carried as passengers, two of whom were military attachés. They departed Japan on 30 June 1943 for Singapore, where the airstrip had to be lengthened by 1,000 meters to assure a safe takeoff. Finally, the aircraft took off at 7:10 on 7 July 1943 with eight tons of fuel, ample to reach Europe. Their intended destination was the German airfield at Sarabus (now Hvardiiske, Crimea, .) but they were to disappear over the Indian Ocean. British fighters likely intercepted them as they were aware of the flight and its route (via air grid squares 3420, 2560 and 2510) thanks to the ULTRA analysts at Bletchley Park decoding intercepted German communications to Sarabus warning of their impending arrival. Slow, unarmed, without armour protection and with a substantial amount of fuel on board, the Ki-77 would have been vulnerable to Allied fighters, even had no mechanical problems occurred. Endurance record flight Japan carried out a second flight to gain an endurance record and to verify the Ki-77's capabilities. The existing record had been held by Italy's Savoia-Marchetti SM.75GA since 1939. Even if the usefulness of record breaking flights was overshadowed in 1944 by the necessities of war, the Japanese needed a propaganda coup and the surviving Ki-77 was available. On 2 July it flew 19 circuits over a triangular route off Manchuria, landing 57 hours 9 minutes later and covering at an average speed of , more than the SM.75's record. The Ki-77 landed with 800 liters remaining in the tanks of the it began with, so the maximum endurance was around . The Ki-77's endurance record was first exceeded in October 1946 by a Lockheed P2V-1 Neptune in a flight from Perth, Australia to Columbus, Ohio in the American midwest, of over . The distance record Ki-77 aircraft was still in existence when Japan surrendered and was shipped to the United States aboard the United States Navy escort carrier from Yokosuka in December 1945, arriving at Alameda, California on 8 January 1946 for examination before being scrapped. Operator Imperial Japanese Army Air Service