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Hi guys, The Academy Blackhawk is not a bad kit but it has some major detail or shape issues here and there. As I'm now the lucky owner of the full Kitty Hawk range of S-70-based kits, I realized that many of them have spare parts. The situation is very variable from kit to kit but without any doubt the best donor of the lot is the Navy MH-60S. Out of my memory, you can retrieve the following Army spare parts from that kit: - the cabin roof - the cabin floor - the nose hatch - the nose windows ('Navy' with pitot support area but very close to the Army ones and this helps a lot in correcting the Academy nose) - the front doors with internal details - the front seats side armor - the extinguishers - some IP parts - the main rotor blades (compatible with the Reskit rotor head parts and this also helps a lot in improving the kit) - M240 machine guns - the internal fuel tank with hoses (but without the fixing straps) - the external winch - rocket launchers Useless to say this will need some work to be combined with the Academy kit but this looks feasible without too much fuss for most parts (except the nose windows). If you add to them the Reskit sets (both rotors and LG wheels) plus the Eduard sets, few areas still need major improvements to get a beautiful replica. The other annoying areas are the cabin rear bullkhead, the internal fuselage areas on both internal sides of the large doors and the tail rotor fairing shape. The cabin parts were available from Cobra company. Note that with some re-usable rubber (blue stuff) and resin, I've been able to cast some copies of the corresponding sections of the Kitty Hawk parts after some attempts. If you have never tried that stuff, do it! It is reusable as many times as you want in some minutes, does not shrink, does not age badly, does not have storage issues, does not have bubbles problems, etc. etc. For sure that is not comparable with silicone rubber and is mainly useful for small parts but I even succeeded in casting a flat bulkhead that is close to 5*5cm! Terrific product!!! I'm considering making a tweak list for this old dog if someone is interested. One may wonder what is the purpose of using the Academy kit while the KH kits have been released. Well, there are some features that are clearly useful on the old kit. First, if you want to make an early Blackhawk, the kit does not have all the fuselage reinforcement parts. Moreover, the kit does not have all the divot lines of the KH kit. So, there are far less lines to fill before adding Archer rivets and finally some very specific areas such as the meshes are better depicted (the best example being the large rounded one on the top of the tail rotor head). THAT one is awful on the Kitty Hawk kits. I'm still wondering how to improve that. HTH Thierry