THANK YOU to our friends and suppliers at Aires/Quickboost for another improvement set, in this case for the Trumpeter A-37 Dragonfly. And thanks also to the reviewer corps leaders for making them available for my review.

This set takes the kit components and improves them by directly replacing the kit parts with fine, pressure-molded resin parts. These are very thin and fragile! Included are six antennas; two VHF blades, two Glideslope blades, one UHF blade, and one Omnidirectional antenna blister.

Remove the parts from their pour stub, and superglue in place. These fit in place of the kit items, no additional sanding or kit plastic removal required. Quick and improved kit appearance with scale size and thickness.

The kit parts are good; the Aires parts are better. Improved, more “scale” detail, more finesse on the antennas, and they are correctly a bit smaller in size. The parts also have “sharper” molding on the parts overall.

Eduard has released a new mold of the Bf-109F-4, perhaps the most elegant and streamlined of all the 109s.

In the Profipack package you get 5 sprues (including a clear one), a color photo-etch fret, two decal sheets for 5 markings (all Luftwaffe) and a mask set for the canopy and the tail wheel. No flash anywhere and very sharp, recessed panel lines are a signature of those sprues.

While you get 5 sprues, you also get plenty of unused (spare) parts, like 3 different propellers, different wheels, some weapons, different rudders, air intakes, oil coolers and even extra canopies, so you should be able to get some “extras” for other 109s in your collection.

As expected, construction starts with the cockpit and it is a very straightforward and well-designed subcomponent. You make it look even better by adding photoetch belts plus a provided fuel line in clear plastic, which when masked and painted looks outstanding.

Eduard re-released their 1/72 scale Fokker Dr.1 late last year, but this time in the form of a Weekend Edition kit that includes the markings for two aircraft (one flown by Lt. August Raben, the other piloted by Lt. Hermann Vallendor). The kit builds up easily enough, and I can recommend the kit on its own. For this particular review, I have added parts from the Eduard Zoom set (product SS 576), which did a nice job of touching up the cockpit, engine, and guns.

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.