John1

Agreed. I still remember seeing the Blues fly one of their last A-4 flights as a kid. It was awesome and, no disrespect to the current teams, I thought it was much better than the Hornet shows.

I would also think the training and logistical costs would be extremely excessive. It’s not like you can pull Tutor-certified avionics, airframe, electrical maintenance techs from the main force and assign them to the Snowbirds. You have to train them from scratch just to support this one unit. Plus, it must be a bear to find the required spare parts. Kinda like the Blue Angles still flying A-4’s in 2019. Heck the USN can barely keep it’s Superhornets airworthy, I shudder to think how’d they be able to keep a unit full of antiques flying at peak performance.

Do you have any that show the cowl from a frontal perspective? I'd be curious to see how the real thing compares to the pics HB has posted so far. I've obliviously seen some online but most aren't the best quality.

Might be the end of the Tutors.

No one does wheels better than these guys. I’m surprised they didn’t bulge the tires a bit though.

Nice shots Finn. I found the pronounced joint between the glass nose and the rest of the fuselage to be interesting. Almost looks like they sealed it with tape... Also, the first pic Finn posted showed a pretty evident taper of the nacelle. Now I'm not so sure about this issue....

No interest in the "Fighter" variants but I'd surely be up for a B model. For years they were based at my "local" AFB on Cape Cod. 60th FIS had some pretty nice markings to boot.

Thanks Max! Is that the Tamiya kit or Miniart kit?

Horribly slow for me this AM. More often then not, the page is timing out before it can load. Took nearly 4 minutes to save my comments on a thread.

I don't think so.. I'm reading about the glass nose version in the Osprey book, sounds like the noses were interchangeable. In late WW2, units deployed in Europe got a few conversion kits to replace the gun nose w/ glass. Pretty sure everything aft of the nose was uniform on the B&C. As far as turrets go, I think in WW2 they kept both but later on in Korea, they eliminated first the bottom turret and then the upper as well. Thought the upper was replaced with a housing for radio gear on some aircraft.

Did I miss something? Is there a problem with the kit's nose?

Great post bushande, very informative and level headed, especially given the current climate.

Same, both on my PC and phone. Its just this website, everything else is fine. It’s so bad that on occasion, page is timing out.

A lot of folks sell the Iranians short. They’ve accomplished some pretty impressive feats, all the more so given the sanctions that have been in place for decades. The GPS spoofing and subsequent capture of that US RQ-170 Sentinel stealth UAV come to mind as a good example.

As noted, they’ve been carrying the X for a bit now. FWIW, when deployed over Syria, these jets (and other AF types as well) are fitted with a mix of M and X model Sidewinders.