Inside The Zero

THE ZERO WAS JAPAN’S MAIN FIGHTER PLANE THROUGHOUT WORLD War II. By war’s end about 11,500 Zeros had been produced in five main variants. In March 1939, when the prototype Zero was rolled out, Japan was in some ways still so backward that the plane had to be hauled by oxcart from the Mitsubishi factory twenty-nine miles to the airfield where it flew. It represented a great leap in technology.

At the start of World War II, some countries’ fighters were opencockpit, fabric-covered biplanes. A low-wing all-metal monoplane carrier fighter, predecessor to the Zero, had been adopted by the Japanese in the mid-1930s, while the U.S. Navy’s standard fighter was still a biplane. But the world took little notice of Japan’s advanced military aircraft, so the Zero came as a great shock to Americans at Pearl Harbor and afterward.

Lightness, simplicity, ease of maintenance, sensitivity to controls, and extreme maneuverability were the main elements that the designer Jiro Horikoshi built into the Zero. The Model 21 flown by Koga weighed 5,500 pounds, including fuel, ammunition, and pilot, while U.S. fighters weighed 7,500 pounds and up. Early models had no protective armor or self-sealing fuel tanks, although these were standard features on U.S. fighters.

Despite its large-diameter 940-hp radial engine, the Zero had one of the slimmest silhouettes of any World War II fighter. The maximum speed of Koga’s Zero was 326 mph at 16,000 feet, not especially fast for a 1942 fighter. But high speed wasn’t the reason for the Zero’s great combat record. Agility was. Its large ailerons gave it great maneuverability at low speeds. It could even outmaneuver the famed British Spitfire. Advanced U.S. fighters produced toward the war’s end still couldn’t turn with the Zero, but they were faster and could outclimb and outdive it.

Without self-sealing fuel tanks, the Zero was easily flamed when hit in any of its three wing and fuselage tanks or its droppable belly tank. And without protective armor, its pilot was vulnerable.

In 1941 the Zero’s range of 1,675 nautical miles (1,930 statute miles) was one of the wonders of the aviation world. No other fighter plane had ever routinely flown such a distance. Saburo Sakai, Japan’s highest-scoring surviving World War II ace, with sixty-four kills, believes that if the Zero had not been developed, Japan “would not have decided to start the war.” Other Japanese authorities echo this opinion, and the confidence it reflects was not, in the beginning at least, misplaced.

Today the Zero is one of the rarest of all major fighter planes of World War II. Only sixteen complete and assembled examples are known to exist. Of these, only two are flyable: one owned by Planes of Fame, in Chino, California, and the other by the Confederate Air Force, in Midland, Texas.