This is my fourth egg plane. The first was an F-4 Phantom, probably 20 years ago. Since then I’ve done two F-16s, and now the F-22. The original Phantom was very much an egg with wings and stabilizers added. This “aircraft” looks pretty un-egglike. Either that or it’s a very weird chicken.

The kit is pretty simple and goes together quite nicely. The fuselage is two pieces, separated top and bottom. The vertical stabilizers are separate parts, the landing gear is 7 parts, including the doors, and the canopy finishes the parts inventory.

I put the fuselage halves together without glue. They include the wings and horizontal stabs. Then I painted the whole thing. I used Neutral Gray for the main color, with Euro 1 Gray for the dark patches and Dark Ghost Gray for the leading and trailing edges. This looks very tactical.

History

This is an unusual book in that it covers a relatively unknown but significant event in postwar aviation history. This was a series of air displays held at the Prague-Ruzyne Airport immediately following the end of World War II, during that precious time period when the Czechs enjoyed a brief era of freedom before the Communist regime takeover in 1948 drove them back to the Dark Ages where they would languish until democracy regained control when the Soviet Union disintegrated around 1990.

Osprey Publishing’s 90th book in the Osprey Combat Aircraft series is about the AV-8B Harrier II. It is the first in a 3-part set on USMC Harrier IIs in combat. This book is about the units of Operation Desert Storm and Desert Shield. The next 2 volumes will be Operations in Iraq and then Afghanistan.

This is a small book but it is jam-packed with color photographs. A couple of things that I really liked were the 8 pages of color plates of the various units that served in these 2 operations, and the firsthand accounts from the personnel. Particularly interesting to me was the section about VMA-311 from Yuma, Arizona. I’m very interested in the various units that have been based in my home state and I’m trying to build as many kits from them as I can.

Aires specializes in creating replacement parts for kit items that are either lacking in detail or have detail that isn’t quite sharp enough. This set provides replacement parts for the exhaust nozzles for the Academy kit of the F-22 Raptor.

The set is cast in medium grey resin, with no pinholes or miscast parts, along with a nice photoetch sheet for fine parts. The set includes the aft end of the turbine compressors and the afterburner section. The flame holders from the PE sheet are attached to the end of the compressor section, then the afterburner tube is added. The four long triangular pieces are the side pieces of the vectoring nozzles, and the smaller, wider, triangles are the vectoring parts of the nozzles. Each of them receives one of the four “batwing”-shaped pieces of PE, adding to the detail.

Made specifically for the Tamiya 1/48 scale P-47 Bubbletop, this comprehensive aftermarket set comes in Aires’ usual blister package. Separately ensconced in a secondary bubble are photo etch and film parts, along with the usual blue instructions.

In fact, the instructions alone come in for any criticism that may be reasonably leveled at this set. They are composed entirely of minimalist exploded drawings spread over two sides of a single folded sheet of paper, with only number callouts and small notations in both English and Czech. There is no history or background text, and the modeler is left to his own devices concerning colors and, in many cases, actual part placement. However, none of this is really a detriment, and any halfway competent modeler with a reference book or two in his library will overcome nicely.