Summer 1985, the Naval Air Station in Miramar, California and site of the little known Top Gun training academy for Navy fliers. Two of the pilot trainers are walking down the flight line towards their F-14 when they pass this strangely painted F-5E.
"Apparently its for a movie" one of them states. His companion is rather skeptical, "A movie about aircraft training schools?! I can't imagine that will be very popular - half of it will just be watching aeronautical theory lectures..."
This is a build I have fancied for a while - my least favourite part of a build is the painting and if I can just rattle can a single colour onto a build and move on, I will be very happy. The iconic "MiG-28" all black scheme is just perfect. However, decals are sadly lacking in 144th - until I happened upon a sheet of Rubicon 28mm decals that my wife was using on an armoured build and realised that the white star with yellow border and red star from the sheet would scale perfectly to the movie-used scheme and so the build was on...
The Revell kit is relatively old and quite simplified, it needs a fair amount of filler, particularly around the nose cone where the guns are represented by a drop-in part that is slightly too small. It took several goes to get this smooth.
I built it in unison with an actual North Korean MiG kit too.
Masked up and ready to go. It actually ended up needing several rounds of paint due to the need to sand and re-finish the nose twice. I finished off with a semi-gloss to represent a freshly painted airframe.
For the base I carefully referenced images of Miramar to get the textures and tiles right.
Instead of a support vehicle I added an air compressor from this lovely resin set from Heroes Models of Italy which includes a decal sheet (with more markings on this than the F-5!)
The figures were from Rise 144 whose outfits (and even aviator sunglasses) suited the scene perfectly.
Amazing detail on these figures.
With that it all came together and the "MiG" was ready to fly. Thanks for reading, comments and feedback welcome and you can see this model at Telford this year on the SIG144 table.
