OK guys, a show of hands; how many of you don’t like Hasegawa kit decals? You’ve had bad experiences with them and hate ‘em to the point that you won’t build or even buy a given Hasegawa kit unless you can get aftermarket decals for it? Not a problem for those Hasegawa F-Teen kits where you easily have many more aftermarket decal choices than kits. However, when it came to cool looking, non-gray jets, like the Mitsubishi F-2, you were stuck….until now.

Air Modeller magazine was new to me when I volunteered for the review. I was very impressed. This is a 64 page high quality, modeling magazine without any advertising. The magazine seems to cater to the detail conscious modeler. This issue includes five detailed build articles:

• Split Personality F-104G – Part One.
• Handley Page Halifax B. Mk II Series I – Part Two.
• CAC Boomerang
• Ultimate Spitfire
• Curtiss H-75 A3

The magazine also contains an article on new releases, as well as an article showing photos from recent model shows.

Anyone who knows me will tell you my favorite airplane is the Curtiss P-40 and I have a closet full of kits to prove it. One of them is a 1/72 scale Academy kit that I had allotted to the maybe-someday-stack because of conspicuous problems with the way Academy molded the P-40’s fuselage quarter windows. Well, now Aires has (or ‘have’, if you are reading this review in Canada or the UK) added a set of accurate P-40 well bays to their line of resin detail parts, and they’ve brought to my attention another problem area that needs addressing. The kit’s wheel bays are just as inaccurate as the shape of the quarter windows. Fortunately, Aires has done a nice job of solving that problem for me and has led me to move the kit to a higher position in the stack.