This decal sheet represents another of the Yellow-Wings “complete aircraft packages”, this time concentrating on pre-WWII and early war Wildcats. Covered are F4F-3s from two Atlantic Fleet carriers from early 1941, USS Ranger’s VF 41 and USS Wasp’s VF 72, and an early war F4F-4 from USS Enterprise VF-6 based on Guadalcanal and flown by ace Donald Runyon, complete with “tombstone” kill tally tail markings. The set contains all the details that we’ve come to expect from Yellow Wings, including squadron badges, propeller tip markings, walkways and fine pin stripes to outline the painted cowl colors. There are minimal stencils, as was the case on Wildcats of the era. As always, the printing (by Microscale) is sharp and in perfect register, and there is a bare minimum of carrier film. Yellow-Wings recommends the Hobby Boss F4F-3 or the Tamiya F4F-4 (suitably backdated for the Atlantic based aircraft).

Kit Review

The P-47 “Thunderbolt” went through a major design upgrade in 1943, when its canopy and back fuselage was modified to be a “bubbletop”. Based on the information in the book the ‘inspiration’ for this modification was the RAF Hawker Typhoon.

This book covers all the “bubbletop” production variants from P-47D-25 to the final version, the P-47N, including all the related prototypes.

The first section of the book is dedicated to technical details on each prototype and production variants. There are plenty of historical pictures for each variant including foreign operators and post war operators and even a few historical color pictures too.

The second part of the book is a “walk around” of different P-47 preserved in museums. The walk around is neatly organized by “fuselage”, “tails”, “landing gear”, “engine”, etc.

Thanks to David Lajer of Aires, and to IPMS/USA for giving me the opportunity to review this sweet little detail! I recommend it highly.

These pitot tubes are cast in pale tannish gray resin, with three tubes protected by casting sprue on three sides. This arrangement will provide the modeler with enough nose tubes for three planes, or in my case, enough for one plane and two mistakes. The shipping package is reseal-able, so you can keep the extra tubes secured.

There is little to say about these elegant little tubes, after all they are pretty small. But I micrometered them and they are well with scale tolerances. There is a little bit of variability in the length of the real thing anyway, so this is a minor consideration. More importantly, having this small detail greatly enhances a very prominent place on the model.

Bottom line

A good kit which will require a knowledge of using and working with resin parts, doing conversions, and a higher level of air brush skills.

History

The Messerschmitt BF-109T was the projected carrier version of the Bf-109E model. About 70 planes of this version were built by Fiesler. Several modifications had to be made to adapt these single seat fighters for use on aircraft carriers:

I don’t know how many times I’ve scoured through page after page of my aircraft decal sheets looking one or more dial decals to use on a particular instrument panel. Now, Airscale has saved me a whole lot of looking. They have produced a multi-national series of instrument dial decals in 1/48, 1/32 and 1/24 scale. This set, for US Navy aircraft, has scores of different instrument dials printed in two sizes. According to the list on the instructions, there are over a dozen different instruments represented on this sheet. Unfortunately, they aren’t individually identified or separated on the decal sheet itself. On the other hand, for that information to be useful you’d have to either be a pilot, have a better than average knowledge of the instrument panel being modeled, or have a diagram of the specific panel available to you to know what instrument decal goes where.