Description

This is a 7 ½ by 9 ½ inches hard-cover book with 240 pages. All photos are in color and the paper quality is exceptional. Every time I turned the page, I thought that I was turning 2 pages due to the thickness of the individual pages.

Book Theme

The title of the book is “US MULTI-ROLE FIGHTER JETS” and prior to reading this book I only had a vague idea as to what “Multi-Role” meant. In this book Davies describes these jets as having the flexibility to change their mission capabilities (air-to-air, air-to-ground, jamming, protection, missile and AAA suppression, refueling, etc.). Some of the changes are done prior to missions and others are called upon depending on mission discoveries or opportunities.

This decal sheet represents another of the Yellow-Wings “complete aircraft packages”, this time concentrating on pre-WWII and early war Wildcats. Covered are F4F-3s from two Atlantic Fleet carriers from early 1941, USS Ranger’s VF 41 and USS Wasp’s VF 72, and an early war F4F-4 from USS Enterprise VF-6 based on Guadalcanal and flown by ace Donald Runyon, complete with “tombstone” kill tally tail markings. The set contains all the details that we’ve come to expect from Yellow Wings, including squadron badges, propeller tip markings, walkways and fine pin stripes to outline the painted cowl colors. There are minimal stencils, as was the case on Wildcats of the era. As always, the printing (by Microscale) is sharp and in perfect register, and there is a bare minimum of carrier film. Yellow-Wings recommends the Hobby Boss F4F-3 or the Tamiya F4F-4 (suitably backdated for the Atlantic based aircraft).

Kit Review

The P-47 “Thunderbolt” went through a major design upgrade in 1943, when its canopy and back fuselage was modified to be a “bubbletop”. Based on the information in the book the ‘inspiration’ for this modification was the RAF Hawker Typhoon.

This book covers all the “bubbletop” production variants from P-47D-25 to the final version, the P-47N, including all the related prototypes.

The first section of the book is dedicated to technical details on each prototype and production variants. There are plenty of historical pictures for each variant including foreign operators and post war operators and even a few historical color pictures too.

The second part of the book is a “walk around” of different P-47 preserved in museums. The walk around is neatly organized by “fuselage”, “tails”, “landing gear”, “engine”, etc.