In the mid of
the 1970s, Great Britain was searching for a new air-superiority fighter. Also
Germany, Spain, France and Italy were searching for such an aircraft and brought
in first considerations regarding the project. In these years, greatly varying
concepts for a new combat aircraft came into existence. ECA and TKF-90 in
Germany or ACA and EAP from Great Britain.
In 1983, an "EAP"-mock-up was built in Great Britain. After lengthy
discussions and highly varying demands and perceptions in 1985 finally Germany,
Great Britain, Italy and Spain agreed to a common project, now being called
"European Fighter Aircraft" (EFA). In 1992 the project got its current
name "Eurofighter 2000", as it was to be called from now on. Finally,
on 27th of March 1994 the prototype DA 1 with pilot Peter Weger at the controls
takes off from Manching for a successful maiden flight. From 2003 on, delivery
to the Luftwaffe, a process that will take roughly 10 years, is taking place.
The manufacturer pool consisting of EADS, BAe Systems and Alenia Aeronautica
will be an employee for some 130.000 people until the final deliveries are
completed. On April 30th 2007 at about 11:30 the first EF twin seater was rolled out
at JG 73s airfield in Laage, thus completing the first delivery to the
Luftwaffe.
The
Eurofighter has been and still is subject of a lot of discussions,
disquisitions and misinformation in the media landscape. The actual state
of its development, its performance and its potential capabilities are
biased by the media even today, sometimes up to totally wrong
representations. When covering this subject, even distinguished and
reputed news magazines sink to the journalistic level of yellow press
rags.
Facing dwindling funds on the one hand, and urgent demand and the wish as
well as the necessity of independence from the US-military industry on the
other hand, the Eurofighter will have to meet the demands put into it in
the following years – and the operators such as the Luftwaffe will have
to gain new grounds in terms of public relations work.
At this point, I’d like to express my congratulations to the Luftwaffe
and hope they’ll always operate safely with the looked-for new fighter.
Click on
images below to see larger images
The new Revell
kit of the EF-twinseater from the year 2004 is to be rated downright great.
Even less experienced modelers will be able to build a nice model using the
kits’ well-fitting, finely engraved parts which are molded very crisp.
Creditable, as always with Revell, is the considerable amount of external stores
coming with the kit. In this case there are very well reproduced of 2 AIM-9l/M,
4 AIM-120B, 4 Meteor-missiles as well as 2 drop tanks.
The
clearly arranged decal sheet, which leaves nevertheless some room for
improvement, allows the modeller to create German, Spanish and British
aircraft.
All in all, the assembly of this model was rather easy – so I’ll only
consider certain stations during the build and minor hurdles in this
article. The only minor flaw in the cockpit are the very well represented,
though too wide Martin Baker Mk.16 ejection seats. One just has to sand
down the side parts of the seats in the lower area a bit so they’ll fit
in the cockpit tub.
With some wire and masking tape for the seatbelts, this seats can be
immensely improved.
Before assembling the fuselage, the fuselage and air intake parts should
be dry-fitted, to prepare an exact approach for gluing and painting the
interior of the air intakes. The air intake holds some rather complicated
filling and sanding efforts so the less experienced modeller might
consider taking some compromises at this point. The afterburners and
engine nozzles were painted in complete deviation from the instruction
sheet to be able to paint the nozzles separately.
The
wing parts fit flawless, as well as the fuselage spine and the clear parts of
the canopy, as well as the radome. This way, the radome can be painted
separately without any problems and be installed at the very end – on a side
note, the radome is a very good place for some weight. A bit annoying are the
bad wing-fuselage joints. The joints on the model represent some major joints on
the real aircraft. Because of this I filled, sanded and rescribed the whole
area.
Due to the splitting of the wings in upper and lower parts and the appropriate
engraving of the slats, I decided do drop them. I just cut out the slats and
sanded them down on the lower side to get them thinner.
After mounting all the wing parts, the sliding surfaces of the slats were
rebuild using ordinary revell-filler. (completely sufficient and practical for
this job)
The painted slats were installed after painting the rest of the model and
fitted with actuating mechanisms on the lower side which were built from wire
and styrene sheet according to some pictures of the real aircraft. The gear
struts got some hydraulic lines made from wire, the wheels were flattened a bit
using a file.
The German Eurofighters are painted in FS 35237 overall. The gear struts and
wheel wells are painted white; radome, fin tip, leading edges of the slats and
canards as well as the edges of the air intakes are painted in FS 36314.
These colors can be found in the inventory of the different producers but I had
only the according humbrol colors (145 and 167) at hand.
Especially Humbrol 145 for the fuselage doesn’t seem right for the
Eurofighter camouflage, so I painted the fuselage in a custom mixed medium gray
that was finally slight overpainted in Russian underside blue from Model Master.
I’m quite satisfied with the result. The afterburner area was masked off and
painted I with Alclad Aluminium and Dark Aluminium. Be aware that Revell
doesn’t mention the aluminium colored area on the underside in the instruction
sheet!
The afterburner nozzles were painted with Jet exhaust from alclad, after the
underlying areas were primed with black color. Due to the molding form of the
canopy consisting of two parts, there is a small ridge right down the middle of
the canopy that has to be removed.
The canopy was painted flat black on the inside and later got 5 etched mirrors
(3 in front, 2 in the back) and 2 handholds. To pose the canopy open, I cut the
two angled actuating arms from some plastic and glued them to the fuselage.
Installing the well represented landing gear and wheel well covers doesn’t
posses any further peculiarities.
Click on
images below to see larger images
Unfortunately
the decals sheet doesn’t do justice to the overall great quality of the kit:
the markings and stencils are partially out of register and just too strong in
colors. At least for the Luftwaffe version, correctly printed numbers
shouldn’t have been a problem, but this wasn’t realized. The numbers in the
kit are printed with a white edge which isn’t correct. Finally my modelling
colleague Jürgen “Viking” Busse could help me with custom printed numbers
to model the 30+10 I had wanted to build.
Thanks to great pictorial support of a assiduous aircraft spotter (thanks to
Olaf Krohn) I got to know another new detail of the Laage-based Eurofighters in
time – behind the numbers there is an additional bold iron cross.
Regarding the weathering, there’s not a lot to do, representing the “age”
of the Eurofighters at Laage: They haven’t been in service very long now, and
so do not shot a lot of “wear and tear”. On good pictures only small
dirt traces can be seen on some panel lines and access doors. These were
reproduced using a small brush and some brown paint. Already characteristic for
the Eurofighters is a small exhaust stain on the exhaust door on the left
fuselage side – using some pastel chalks is a good idea for this purpose.
I didn’t accent the panel lines – the panel lines on the still new real
aircraft are hardly dirtied and barely just visible anyway. I only accented the
panel lines of the four big fuselage hatches and some wing panel lines very
slightly. I deepened the engravings on the edges of the control surfaces and
used some black water color. Highly visible on some pictures are the locks of
some of the panels on fuselage and wings, I represented them with a pencil – a
method ensuring a very realistic result.
The finished model with its correct dimensions and the very well done shape
represents the dynamic appearance of the Eurofighter very well – Revell did a
very good job with the kit. The only negative aspects are the insufficient decal
sheet and the lack of any indication of the real colors in the instruction
sheet.
Arne
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