PRESS RELEASE:

VIRGINIA BEACH, VA. (November 10th, 2022) – The Military Aviation Museum is excited to announce its acquisition of a rare Mitsubishi A6M3 Zero, formerly of the Imperial Japanese Navy, which has undergone a meticulous restoration at Legend Flyers in Everett, Washington.  Members of the Museum team and the Fighter Factory are headed to the West Coast, to work with the Legend Flyers team and put the aircraft through its pre-flight process.

The principal American adversary in the Pacific Theatre of Operations during WWII, and the Imperial Japanese Navy’s (IJN) premier carrier-based fighter, the A6M was perhaps better known as the ‘Zero’. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries completed A6M3 c/n 3148, the specific aircraft which the Museum has obtained, during September 1942. Although the Allies officially referred to the A6M  by their code word for the type, ‘Zeke’, the A6M3 variant received its own code name of ‘Hamp’. Even so, Allied pilots often simply referred to them as Zeros. This name derives from the IJN’s designation for the aircraft as a Type ‘0’ Carrier Fighter (for the last digit in Imperial Year 2600, when the aircraft was first designed).

A6M3 c/n 3148 is painted in its original wartime markings, replicated from the vestigial remains of an unusual set of markings detected on the original fuselage skins which indicate that middle schoolers in Japanese-occupied…