The Mitsubishi A6M Zero was a light-weight carrier-based fighter aircraft employed by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service from 1940 to 1945.

It is universally known as Zero from its Japanese Navy designation, Type 0 Carrier Fighter (Rei shiki Kanjo sentoki), taken from the last digit of the Imperial year 2600 (1940), when it entered service. In Japan it was unofficially referred to as both Rei-sen and Zero-sen. The official Allied code name was Zeke (Hamp for the A6M3 model 32 variant); while this was in keeping with standard practice of giving boys' names to fighters, it is not definitively known if this was chosen for its similarity to "Zero".

Pictured here is a 1:48 scale replica of an Imperial Japanese Navy Mitsubishi A6M2 "Zero" fighter that was piloted by Saburo Sakai, who was attached to the Tainan Kokutai, then deployed to Formosa, China, from 1940-1941. Sold Out!

Dimensions:
Wingspan: 9-inches
Length: 7-1/4-inches

Release Date: January 2020

Historical Account: "Gekitsui-O" - Sub-Lieutenant Saburo Sakai was a Japanese naval aviator and flying ace ("Gekitsui-O") of the Imperial Japanese Navy during World War II.

Sakai had 28 aerial victories (including shared) by official Japanese records, while his autobiography "Samurai!", co-written by Martin Caidin and Fred Saito, claims 64 aerial victories. Such discrepancies are common, and pilots' official scores are often lower than those claimed by the pilots themselves, due to difficulties in providing appropriate witnesses or verifying wreckage, and variations in military reports due to loss or destruction.

The Tainan Air Group was a fighter aircraft and airbase garrison unit of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) during the Pacific campaign of World War II. The flying portion of the unit was heavily involved in many of the major campaigns and battles of the first year of the war. The exploits of the unit were widely publicized in the Japanese media at the time, at least in part because the unit spawned more aces than any other fighter unit in the IJN. Several of the unit's aces were among the IJN's top scorers, and included Hiroyoshi Nishizawa, Saburo Sakai, Junichi Sasai, Watari Handa, Masaaki Shimakawa, and Toshio Ōta.