Often forgotten about Naval Aviation in Vietnam is the diminutive A-4 Skyhawk. Despite its small size, this nimble little aircraft could carry an amazing amount of bombs. Flown by the Marines and the Navy, this aircraft carried out some of the most dangerous missions in Vietnam.

AOA Decals continues to release Vietnam era subjects and I for one love their choice of subjects. This set is designed for the Hasegawa kits of the A-4C and A-4E.

The instructions are packaged in a 9 x 12 inch Ziploc bag and are printed in full color on four double-sided pages. The instructions are little works of art displaying the side profile for 13 aircraft. The initial page gives you information to make the Hasegawa kit more accurate. Each aircraft is described in detail to let you figure out what to include from the kit and decals. There is a page for each type of Skyhawk airframe with data and stencils.

The Apache is an impressive helicopter (when it works, sorry former Cobra pilot said a bad thing). What makes it really impressive is the Hellfire missile system. Also carried by the OH-58D Kiowa Warrior and many drones the Hellfire has allowed anti-tank and anti-personnel capabilities unheard of before. The ability to reach out and torch things 10Ks away is always good for the crewmembers and bad for bad guys.

Packaged in a typical Brassin box with foam cushioning. Inside the foam are three small ziplock bags containing the resin parts in light and dark grey resin. There are two clear resin blocks with the missile warheads. I could not find any flaws or blemishes on any of the parts. There are 50 resin parts. The resin covers two eight missile launchers. This is a typical loadout for the Apache. The Kiowa Warrior would have a single launcher with two missiles per side.

The North American P-51D requires little if any introduction, however reference material for it is always sought after. This book is intended to cover all bubbletop variants: -D, -K, CAC production and Cavalier production.

The book is broken down in a logical way, having a 2-page introduction to the type (as I said, it does not need much introduction). Then it goes into the production series, with the –D and –K series as the main versions covered while the CAC (Australian) and Cavalier production are also covered, but not as in depth as the previous versions. You get many 1/72^nd scale drawings of all the different production series.

A really interesting section is a comparison of performance with other fighters of the same time: Bf-109G, Mc.202, Fw-190, P-47 and Spitfire. Let’s be clear, this is not a “how will win a dogfight”, but rather a comparison on climb rates, weight, speed, ceiling and such.