Visitors: Zero Ok. You are in the cockpit of a Wirraway, a license-built Harvard trainer, off the northern coast of Papua on December 26, 1942. There is a "Zero" below you. Its pilot hasn't seen you... yet. There are two machine guns in front of you and one behind you. Do the maths. That's what RAAF Pilot Officer John Archer probably decided during that recce sortie. What happened next was so extraordinary that it earned him a Silver Star from the United States and saw his two-seater aircraft "D" A20-103 immortalised in the Australian War Memorial. Many accounts of this encounter repeat Archer's claim he'd downed a "Zero" - and so most assume this means the Mitsubishi A6M. It turns out it was an IJAAF fighter, a Nakajima Ki43 Hayabusa (which acquired the Allied reporting name "Oscar"). I've read that the "Oscar" proved to be a nimble but rather under-armed fighter by the standards of the day- but "Zeke" or not, if you are in a Wirraway you definitely want to get off the first shots... I've based the Oscars' texture on photos of a splendidly refurbished Ki43 "fix-er-upper" I tracked down online at the "Flying Heritage Collection" in the US. That apparently comes from the right theatre and a likely "Sentai" (No. 11). That machine was pulled as a derelict from its jungle "workshop" near Rabual at the war's end. I've gone out on a limb and assumed that the pilot who went "missing" that day flew an early model - with a two-bladed prop, (like the museum example). Rendered in Vue 8 Esprit Assets WW2 Nakajima Zero (Zero???... thats what it says) (CP, PoserWorks) My CAC Wirraway model Thanks for viewing and comments