F/A-18 Hornets Part 1: Legacy Hornets Decals

Published on
April 22, 2023
Review Author(s)
Scale
1/72
MSRP
$11.95
Product / Stock #
SQD 72001
Base Kit
Any 1/72 F/A-18C
Company: Squadron - Website: Visit Site
Provided by: Squadron - Website: Visit Site
Cover

Last summer Squadron Hobbies released three sets of decals for the F/A-18 Hornet and Super Hornet family. Set 72001 provides decals for three legacy F/A-18C’s in high-visibility schemes, the CAG (the carrier air wing commander) aircraft from VFA-97 Warhawks, VFA-37 Ragin Bulls and VFA-15 Valions (2001).

The instructions include a full color profile view of the left side of each aircraft, the right side of the nose of each jet and full color overhead view along with a color key listing the FS numbers for each color. There is also a small detail drawing of the drop tank markings for each squadron.

The decals are very sharply printed with no offsets or misprints. Colors are nice and crisp and for most of the markings, the carrier film is pretty minimal being cut close to the edges of the decals themselves. The set includes the main markings for all three aircraft and includes two sets of black walkways and one light grey set along with two sets of blue intake warnings and one red set, so check the instructions and your references carefully to make sure you have the right colors for the jet you are modeling. The set also includes two sets of national insignia and three sets of “slime lights” (low light formation lights). Some of the smaller stencils are missing different letters, so I suspect that this is intentional to replicate the stencils on these aircraft when they were photographed. While the aircrew names and plane captain names are nice and crisp, some of the other common stencils are not as crisp and a little hard to read.

As the decals are printed by Microscale for Squadron, I suspect they will be easy to work with. I recently worked with one of Squadron Decals’ other Hornet decal sets and found that the decals work extremely well with MicroSet and MicroSol. I was very pleased to discover that I had no silvering of the clear decal surrounding the large squadron logos/markings or the smaller ones, except where I had not adequately smoothed out the surface before decaling.

The cover page lists the suggested kits as F/A-18C kits from Hasegawa, Academy, Revell/Monogram and Fujimi, so you should not have a problem finding a kit to use them with.

This is a really nice set of decals from Squadron and brings me back to my early days of modeling as I eagerly awaited the next catalog to see what the new Microscale sheets would be.

Highly recommended.

Thank you to Squadron for the review sample.

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