5000 Francs Kawasaki KI-100

The Ki-100 was a late-war Japanese Army interceptor born from necessity rather than design: Kawasaki had a surplus of Ki-61 airframes but a critical shortage of the liquid-cooled engines they were built around. Engineers grafted a Mitsubishi radial engine onto the existing fuselage in a matter of weeks, and the resulting aircraft outperformed nearly everything Japan had left flying in 1945. Burundi's inclusion of this aircraft in a numismatic series is a purely commercial decision — the country has no historical connection to the Pacific air war whatsoever.