A Few P-51 Mustang Cockpit Questions

[John1]

I'm slowly working on a Korean War F-51D.   Just got the very nice Barracuda resin seat.   Reading the instructions, I have few questions:

 

They mention the seat is Bronze Green.  Is this correct (and if so, any good matches for this paint)?  I thought only Interior Green was used on the Mustang?

 

They also mention that the pilot's head rest could be khaki, OD or Dark Brown.   For a later F-51D, which color would be most common?  I'm hoping khaki would be a good choice, just to add some color to the black cockpit.

 

Lastly - for Mustangs that had their cockpit's repainted black, would the inner fuselage walls behind the pilot's seat (ie - in the fuel tank area) have also been painted black or would they have been left in their original WW2 interior green? 

[John1]

10 hours ago, Jennings Heilig said:

 

The cockpit color - well, that depends.  Lots of Mustangs left the factory right at the end of WWII and were immediately cocooned and put into storage.  The ones that were pulled out and put in service in Korea most likely had their WWII factory cockpit colors.  No reason to repaint an essentially brand new airplane (ever tried to paint a cockpit on a real airplane?  Think about it...).  The birds that were in service with ANG units in the US that were called up may or may not have had black cockpits if they'd been through depot maintenance before going.  Hard to say, and nobody is ever going to be able to prove you wrong . One possible way to tell on the latter is if the tail number is painted in the characteristic NAA tall narrow style (factory stock) or in another style (depot repaint).  

 

Thanks Jennings. I'll probably go with a heavily worn dark brown headrest (unless I can find a pic of a khaki one).

 

Thanks for the info on the black cockpits. I was aware of that, was hoping to find out how far back the black was applied.  However, in thinking about it, I'm going to leave the interior walls aft of the armor plate green.   Can't believe the AF would have gone to the trouble of removing all that grear to spray those sidewalls black.  

 

With regard to the cockpit - here is the effect I'll be shooting for:

 

This seems to be a pretty much unrestored F-51D cockpit, found on the Mustang displayed at the USAF Museum in OH (it's funny - they took the time to repaint the exterior as a WW2 bird but left the cockpit untouched). 

[MikeMaben]

Here's the other side :

 

 

Looks like they just brush painted the black over the original green.