Here's my 1/48
Hasegawa Hellcat done in Blue Angel markings. Team leader Roy "Butch"
Voris (who passed away just last year) formed the team in 1946 operating war
surplus Grumman F6F-5 Hellcats for a very brief period before transitioning
to the Grumman Bearcat. The aircraft were painted standard Gloss Dark Sea Blue
but featured the titling in gold leaf. This scheme would change with the
Bearcats, becoming a lighter blue with deep yellow titles, as well as repeating
"US NAVY" underneath each wing.
Click on
images below to see larger images
|
|
|
I used the excellent Hasegawa
F6F-5K Target Towplane kit as the basis for my model, with a few mods which were
largely guesswork, since there isn't much info available on these aircraft. I
filled in the leading edge machine gun holes and ejector chutes on the wing,
used a Black Box cockpit but left off the gunsight, and replaced the cowl with
one from Cutting Edge. I also replaced the sliding portion of the canopy with a
vacformed one from Squadron, and added new True Details tires to top things
off.
Paint was Model Master Gloss Dark
Sea Blue polished between coats. I wanted to model Voris' aircraft (#1) and
ended up drawing decals with Adobe Illustrator and having them ALPS printed by
Draw Decal (which now offers them in any scale: drawdecal.com) in a very nice
metallic gold. Hasegawa recently released a Blue Angels Hellcat kit but
unfortunately got the markings wrong and did them in yellow (oops!). I chose to
do a minimum of weathering - merely adding a very faint exhaust stain above the
wing. While not as flashy as the Blues' later aircraft, Voris' glossy #1 is an
appealing piece of aviation history.
Jeff
Click on
images below to see larger images
|
|
|
|