ISR Tour: Japanese Zero - a podcast by National Museum of the U.S. Air Force

One of the greatest Foreign Materiel Exploitation stories of World War II was the testing of a crashed Japanese Navy A6M2 Zeke, known as Koga’s Zero. After the Japanese attack on Dutch Harbor, Alaska, in June 1942, a Zero piloted by an Ensign Koga, crash-landed on an island in the Aleutians. A PBY Catalina spotted the Zero. Navy personnel recovered it, buried the pilot and took the aircraft to San Diego. After making it flyable, the Navy conducted performance and vulnerability testing against all American fighter aircraft. They learned that the Sakae engine was carbureted and cut out in a negative G maneuver. The aircraft rolled faster to the left than to the right and that in a high speed dive the Zero’s controls stiffened due to compressibility issues. By November 1942, all the intelligence went to the fleet and the tide turned against the Zero. It was an intelligence treasure and one of the great FME projects of the war.

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