The U-2 is one of those historic planes that many people have heard of whether they are fans of planes or not. From the shooting down of Francis Gary Powers to its long service of gathering intelligence, it has always interested me. AVF Club has issued their first kit of this iconic plane as the U-2A Dragon Lady.

Inside the box, there are eight grey sprues with petit panel lines and no flash, easily the equivalent of top-flight manufacturers. One crystal clear sprue is provided along with a large decal sheet and a nice picture of the box art. There are three options in the box for markings:

Wikipedia strikes again!: The AAI RQ-7 Shadow is an American unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) used by the United States Army, Australian Army, and Swedish Army for reconnaissance, surveillance, target acquisition, and battle damage assessment.

Launched from a trailer-mounted pneumatic catapult, it is recovered with the aid of arresting gear similar to jets on an aircraft carrier. Its gimbal-mounted, digitally stabilized, liquid nitrogen-cooled electro-optical/infrared (EO/IR) camera relays video in real time via a C-band line-of-sight-data link to the ground control station (GCS).

The RQ-7 Shadow is the result of a continued US Army search for an effective battlefield UAV after the cancellation of the Alliant RQ-6 Outsider aircraft. AAI Corporation followed up their RQ-2 Pioneer with the Shadow 200, a similar, more refined UAV. In late 1999, the army selected the Shadow 200 to fill the tactical UAS requirement, re-designating it the RQ-7.

The Bf-109 is an iconic fighter of the Third Reich. Developed in 1935 the single engine monoplane fighter struck fear into the enemies of the Reich until the end of the war. Continuously developed throughout the war the fighter even survived the fall of Germany in the air forces of Spain, Czechoslovakia and ironically the fledgling Israel.

This softbound book contains 80 pages of high quality paper and 100 color illustrations and pictures. The book includes a variety of black and white historical images, as well as, a number of contemporary color photos not just of the Bf-109 but also its opponents. There are eight pages of color profiles that are quite nice and run the entire production from the first 109 to the last Spanish and Czech ones.

The F-15, no other aircraft in history has been as successful in air-to-air engagement, as the Eagle. Prior to Desert Storm, the Eagle was used successfully by the Israelis but had been unproven in use by the US Air Force.

The F-15C is a beautiful aircraft and during Desert Storm it proved itself so successful scoring 32 aerial victories of the 41 victories achieved by the US forces.

The Aircraft

Harriers are famous for being able to take off and land vertically. Of course, taking off vertically with a full combat load isn’t practical, unless your mission is to drop a teacup of napalm just off the airfield border. Nevertheless, the Harrier has been successful, and it’s because of the ability to adjust the exhaust to vector it through the nozzles to allow downward as well as normal push for vertical and normal flight.

The Kit

The entire kit is two sets of nozzles, one forward, one rear, left and right sides.

I used the Dragon AV-8B kit for this review, and the nozzles fit in the Dragon fuselage with no modification.