Flying Colors Aerodecals has updated their 1/48 Swedish National Insignia sheet for the recent explosion in Swedish aircraft from Tarangus (Saab Lansen and Viggen), Special Hobby (He 115), and Pilot Replicas (Saab J-21). See the table below for what it contains, but you can do anything from an Avro Lancaster to Hughes 300. The instructions provide a guide to insignia size for 62 different aircraft to cover your wings and fuselage. If you are in to ‘What-If” or fantasy, the sky is the limit.
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The Kitty Hawk AH-1Z was ready for decals.
So, on to WW Decals 48-08. One word of caution; decide which aircraft you want to model BEFORE you paint! Floyd gives you eight different choices of aircraft, and there is something different about the color demarcation lines or non-skid paint or patches of other color paint on each aircraft. I didn’t have that forethought, so the end result was there was one aircraft that I could depict, and that was NO. 41 of HMM-268 (REIN). The sheet also contains two sets of common markings.
Having flown the AH-1G, Q, Mod S, Prod S and Prod S (ECAS) while on active duty with the U.S. Army, I am always drawn to any version of the AH-1. It is truly an exciting aircraft to fly and it just looks plain wicked! The aircraft has been around since 1966 and the AH-1Z is the latest incarnation of that airframe, and tends to make you think it’s going to be around much longer, still. And Kitty Hawk has done a great job of presenting us with a detailed model of the Marines’ newest helicopter. And, our very own Floyd Werner was involved in the design and production of this kit from the very beginning. Thanks go to Floyd for all of his time and efforts to produce this kit. Now, if he can just convince them to do a G Model or F model in 1/48 or 1/35, we’ll be on a roll.
The Kit
Upon opening the box you are presented with 4 sprues of grey and 1 sprue of clear plastic, a sheet of decals, an 8 page instruction fold out and a 4 page color & markings guide. The plastic is nicely molded with fine recessed lines, no flash and just a few pin marks. The clear parts a thin and very clear. The decals are in register and look very nice.
This set is a beautiful pair of brass wing mounted pitot tubes for the Eduard L-39 Albatros kit. As shown in the photos, the kit pitots are very basic straight pieces of sprue with no taper or refinement. The Master Model replacements accurately capture the different diameters of the Albatros’pitot tubes, which range from fairly wide at the wing leading edge, then stepping down two sizes to a nice point at the tip.