Close Air Support in the Andes

Academy make a great little A-37B Dragonfly in 1/72nd scale; it comes with 4 LAU-3 rocket pods, 4 Mk. 82 Bombs, 4 external fuel tanks and two sub-munitions dispensers. Decal options include markings for either the United States Air Force or Republic of Korea Air Force (South Korea). A word of warning though, I don’t know if it was just my kit or most Academy kits but the decals were very fragile and next to useless.

When I purchased this kit I had wanted to build either an Ecuadorian or Peruvian example from the Cenepa War. Unfortunately finding decals for either country at the time proved difficult so I settled on the Chilean Air Force and chose an attractive green and black camouflage scheme. I entered this kit into a campaign build on Aeroscale called Close Air Support but I didn’t make the deadline. I later entered the partially finished model into another campaign called Hanger Queen and was awarded a ribbon for finishing it.

I painted the cockpit with a mixture of Revell and Vallejo paints, my two preferred brands as they’re both easy to brush by hand.

When it came to joining the fuselage I knew I would need to add weight to the nose as the Dragonfly has a large tail. My plan from the get-go had been to stack several 1 cent coins in the nosecone.

The Dragonfly was one step ahead of my; however, and presented a nosecone smaller than the coin. As I didn’t have any fishing weights nor any alternatives at the time I turned to the PVA glue.

I took some fine gravel left over from an old armour project and mixed it in with the PVA glue until the concoction was nice and thick. Then I packed it all into the nosecone, filling it completely. Initially I thought it had worked as the it felt pretty heavy but as it dried overnight it started getting lighter. By the time the tail and undercarriage had been added the kit began tipping backwards. I went out and bought a bag of fishing weights after that experience but it was to late to save the Dragonfly. Thankfully when I added the under-wing ordinance to the kit it tipped the scales forward slightly and up-righted the A-37.

The Dragonfly is a very attractive little jet and kit is very nice also although not without little problems. When I assembled the kit I realised the engine intakes had a small cross shaped gap inside them letting light through; you can actually look down the intake chute and out the exhaust on the other side. Also, be very careful after you add the refueling boom to the front of the aircraft as it is easy to break; I believe I broke it twice resulting in it being shortened. After canopies my biggest foe on an aircraft is definitely the refueling boom.

In the picture above you can just about see the weapons I chose to fit to the aircraft. These include two Mk. 82 Bombs, an LAU-3 rocket pod and an external fuel tank; the same will be replicated on the opposite wing. If you check out the Resources section of the blog you can see a loadout chart for the A-37 which can carry quite a lot of gear.

Retired in 2009 the Chilean Air Force operated about 44 A-37’s at one time. They sported different camouflage schemes depending on which area of the country they served in. In this case I chose an overall green scheme with black ribbon camouflage. I undercoated the kit in Humbrol Matt White from a rattle can and then preceded to paint, by hand, the kit in Vallejo Reflective Green.

I realise that airbrushing is the standard nowadays when it comes to painting models but for those of us with limited cash and limited space an airbrush-compressor setup is difficult. I believe that if approached appropriately and slowly that hand-brushing a model can produce great results. Rushing on the other hand will produce not so great results as I’m currently experiencing with a BAe Hawk…

Following the Reflective Green came a bottle of Vallejo Black and a new experience, painting camouflage by hand. I made the mistake of taking a small round brush to paint in the edges of the camouflage which actually produces thick, lumpy borders. It’s much better to use your regular brush, in my case a #4 square brush, and paint in the camouflage normally making sure no ridges are forming at the edge. It may help drawing in the camouflage borders with a light pencil first.

When the paint coat had fully dried I started another experiment of sorts. Johnsons Klear is a staple product for many modellers who use it for gloss coating. In Eire and in the U.K the formula was changed a few years back and old formula disappeared fast into the locked closets of modellers, safe from wives, children and the occasional raider. I picked up a bottle of the new formula to try it out and I hated it. I hated the woozy smell, I didn’t like the satin finish it gave and I didn’t like the smoky effect it left on the tail. My experiences with the new formula persuaded me into buying Vallejo Gloss Varnish which I’ve used ever since.

The Chilean Air Force decals, from the picture above, came from a set called Vivacious Vipers #2 made by the Mexican company Zotz. It’s a very nice decal set which provides markings for F-16’s in service with about 7 different countries. I ordered the set online with the aim of using roundels for various different projects.

I also bought Vallejo Decal Fix and Decal Set to help with the project and they worked a treat. Decaling can be a very satisfying process as it brings your kit to life and it’s even better when the decal conforms to the panel lines and really looks the part. The Zotz decals offered up no problems whatsoever although I did clumsily tear a point off of one of the tail stars.

I did make one small error in the painting though, the tail rudder should be painted a shade of blue. I had conflicting resources but it looks like many Chilean Air Force planes are painted this way. I realised this after I had added the decals and I wouldn’t risk painting around them.

Attaching the weapons to the pylons in this kit is a lesson in patience; each weapon comes with a shallow indentation on it and the pylon has a narrow protrusion, as you can imagine this becomes very fiddly very fast. I found it so fiddly; in fact, that I used fast drying super glue to hold them in place. Unfortunately this had made the connection very brittle so I have to be careful moving the kit about or it’ll drop a bomb. Besides the poor connectors I’m very happy with the ordinance, I think it’s a great job that Academy thinks to add them to the kit. An A-37 Dragonfly would look awfully bare without something on those pylons.

The last stage of the build on this kit was attaching the canopy and this is where disaster struck. I knew that regular glue would fog up the glass if I wasn’t careful so I first used PVA glue instead as it dries nice and clear. It turned out to be of poor quality though and flaked off. Then I had the crazy idea of using super glue very cautiously. Of course super glue being super glue it quickly stuck to my fingers which stuck to the canopy and marked it in several places permanently. To make matters worse the fit of the canopy was terrible for whatever reason. I was gutted to say the least but best to chuck it up to a learning experience. I’ve since bought a special glue from Revell designed for attacking canopies and it works pretty well.

So there it is, an A-37B Dragonfly of the Chilean Air Force. It probably has the shortest refueling boom of any Dragonfly today but at least it’s unique, right? All in all the Academy kit builds up into a nice model and I may get another sometime in the future.

The A-37 Dragonfly: Cessna’s Little Warplane

By 1966 the Vietnam War was in full swing and the U.S Air Force was feeling the pressure. Their dedicated close air support plane, the A-1 Skyraider, was experiencing severe losses to enemy ground fire.

The Skyraider was a WWII vintage, prop driven, heavy-hitting beast that proved very successful during the Korean War but was now showing its age. Enemy gunners had begun equipping themselves to shoot down the fast moving F-4 Phantom II’s and F-100 Super Sabres leaving the Skyraider little room to compete; the Air Force needed a replacement, one fitted with jet engines and capable of operating from makeshift airfields with short runways.

Several years previous the U.S Air Force had evaluated a light attack modification to the highly successful jet trainer built by Cessna, the T-37. Although the prototype had done well the Air Force had decided to pass on the little jet and stick with the tried and tested Skyraider. With the Skyraider on the way out the Air Force turned back to Cessna and gave the go ahead for the development of the prototype which would become the A-37A Dragonfly.

Usually when a new aircraft is brought into the U.S Air Forces inventory it is required to undergo 9 months of rigorous testing before being cleared for combat. The A-37 was to undertake a radical path however. 25 aircraft were formed into the 604th Air Commando Squadron and sent to the Bien Hoa airbase in Vietnam for live combat trails. It was an unheard of decision but one that would prove successful.

When the 604th arrived in Bien Hoa they found themselves sharing the airbase with F-100 Super Sabres whose pilots weren’t entirely impressed with the diminutive little Dragonfly although it probably didn’t help that they were delivered in crates.

The A-37 was quite unlike the fast swept wing jets of the time; it featured straight wings allowing it slower approach speeds, a rough handling undercarriage, wingtip fuel tanks and a 7.62mm mini-gun in the nosecone. Furthermore, the A-37 didn’t require a ladder to reach the cockpit; so small was the jet you only had to throw your leg over the fuselage and climb in. Yet despite it’s size the A-37 had 8 hard-points and could carry a wide variety of bombs, cluster bombs, napalm canisters, rocket pods and gun pods; just check out the Resources section of the blog for a look at a weapons chart for the Dragonfly.

When it came to actual combat the A-37 quickly became popular with the troops on the ground. Lower approach speeds typically equated to near perfect accuracy as it gave the pilots more time to focus on their targets. Dragonfly pilots would often be flying so low and concentrating so hard on their target that they’d literally skim the tops of the treelines. Maintenance crews were always pulling out tree limbs and associated debris from out under the little jets. The A-37 would prove to be very resilient to damage however. In one incident over North Cambodia a Dragonfly pilot noticed to late he was heading for a rather large tree and sheared off a good 15 feet at 400mph. Consequently the impact bent back one wing about 25 degrees rupturing a napalm canister in the process. With flammable liquid spraying over his plane the pilot had two choices, either bail out over the hostile Cambodian jungle or attempt to limp home. The pilot chose the latter and with nightfall rapidly approaching managed to get back to base with neither engine on the A-37 failing.

Within a year of establishment at Bien Hoa the combat trials were considered a success; not a single Dragonfly had been downed by enemy fire in over 3,000 missions. Based on valuable experience gained from the field Cessna developed the uprated A-37B of which 557 were built and about 250 were delivered to the South Vietnamese Air Force.

By the end of the war the Dragonfly had flown over 160,000 missions and the USAF had only lost 22 planes. The number is low but one has to consider that the A-37 never flew over the flak ridden skies of North Vietnam and never encountered the heavy resistance that the fast jets had to deal with. Still, the little warplane proved itself more than capable of doing the job laid out for it. When South Vietnam fell to the Communists around 90 Dragonfly’s were captured and pressed into service over the skies of Cambodia and against China during the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979 until lack of spares grounded the fleet. 

With the Vietnam War over the USAF quickly passed on their remaining A-37’s to both the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve were they served in a forward air control capacity until replaced by the much more powerful A-10 Warthog.

During the 1970’s many Dragonfly’s were exported to Central and South America were they proved very popular due to lost costs, ease of maintenance and capability in counter-insurgency operations.

In 1995 Ecuador and Peru clashed in a border conflict called the Cenepa War and both sides would use the A-37B Dragonfly to great effect. During the war the Dragonfly would display it’s resilience to damage yet again; an Ecuadorian jet received a direct hit from a MANPADS surface-to-air missile yet managed to make it back to base and was fully operational again within a few days. The Dragonfly would prove susceptible to air-to-air missiles; however, as during the conflict an Ecuadorian Kfir brought down a Peruvian Dragonfly with an Israeli missile.

Although the A-37B Dragonfly is now getting on a bit in age it is still in the inventory of many countries throughout Latin America and may be for quite some time. Surprisingly there isn’t a lot of information about the Dragonfly out there and you won’t find many famous pilots associated with the little jet but there’s no doubt that the A-37 was a successful warplane and a success for Cessna.

Maritime Strike with the Fleet Air Arm

If you want to model a Buccaneer in 1/72nd scale then you need look no further than Airfix.

Airfix offer a 1-in-3 Buccaneer model set and the options include a Royal Navy S.2D, a Royal Air Force S.2B and a South African Air Force S.Mk.50. Now the kit is certainly not perfect; there’s quite a few fit issues throughout as well as a mixture of engraved and raised panel lines but on the upside there’s also quite a few weapons options within.

These weapons options include two 1000lb laser guided bombs (British variants), an ALQ-101 ECM pod, a Pave Spike laser designator, an AIM-9 Sidewinder, four Matra SNEB rocket pods and four external fuel tanks; two British and two South African. There’s also four missiles in the kit that are not mentioned in the instructions; these come from an older iteration of the kit and can be built in different ways. The missile options allow for either four Sea Eagle anti-ship missiles, four T.V guided Martel anti-ship missiles or four Martel radar guided missiles. I guarantee you would have a hard time tracking down those missiles elsewhere; the Sea Eagles are quite a bonus as they have been fitted to both Harriers and Jaguars during their respective careers.

I’ve put a copy of the old build instructions for the missiles on the Resources page of the blog.

I started building this kit back in March and entered it into a Campaign Build on Aeroscale, the Anti-Shipping Campaign. The picture above of the Buccaneer beside a Harrier GR.5 gives an indication of how tall and wide a Buccaneer is; you might also notice filler around the tail. As I said above this kit isn’t perfect and neither the joining of the fuselage halves nor the joining of the tail to the fuselage were without problems. Similar problems cropped up when attaching the wings as well.

This picture better explains the problem; towards the front of the fuselage there is raised lines that need sanded and towards the rear of the fuselage there are gaps that need filling. The gap between the tail and the fuselage need a lot of filler as well.

The join between the fuselage and the nosecone was another problem requiring a lot of sanding and filling. At the rear of the aircraft there is a large airbrake and the fit of that was; quite frankly, terrible. It required an excessive amount of sanding and filling, so much in fact that I never quite finished getting it perfect but I did make it look like it fit properly.

Early on in their Royal Navy career the Buccaneers wore a camouflage scheme of Extra Dark Sea Grey on top and White underneath, both gloss. Later in their career the camouflage scheme changed to an overall gloss Extra Dark Sea Grey which is the scheme I chose to recreate.

The kit was painted with Revell Aqua Color Greyish Blue which is a pretty good match for Extra Dark Sea Grey. The Revell Aqua Color range is a great range of acrylic paints and, I can vouch for this myself, with a bit of water they can be hand-painted with ease. I should mention I do all of my painting, beside priming, by hand. I have neither the money nor the space for an airbrush – compressor setup.

I decided early on in the project that I wanted to put the Buccaneer on a flying stand to give it a more dynamic look and feel.

The stand in the picture on the left comes from an Italeri set and is very sturdy; the curved arm attaches to the base via a small screw. The stand is perfect for large and heavy aircraft.

To fix the Buccaneer to the stand I first bored two holes into its bomb bay and I made sure the holes were at about the centre of the aircraft to ensure it remained balanced. Then I took the part of stand which fits over the white swivel head in the picture and slotted it into the bored holes. I had to glue this piece down to keep it slipping out of the Buccaneer and I also had to be careful not to put sideways pressure on it; during construction I accidentally dropped the aircraft and had to repair that particular piece because of a small breakage. Model kits and floors were never meant to meet, especially at speed.

As you can see the Buccaneer really does look impressive when on a flying stand. Now, not long after this picture was taken I finished up painting the Buccaneer and then applied one coat of Vallejo Gloss Varnish. One coat is all I needed as that stuff works a treat and produces a nice gloss coat easily.

After allowing the gloss coat to dry overnight I set about applying the decals. I’ve heard that Airfix decals can be a bit hit and miss at times but I had absolutely no trouble with these; I used Vallejo Decal Set and Decal Fix, setting and softening solutions, as aids though. The decals were followed by a second coat of gloss varnish and because the Buccaneers wore a gloss paint coat I only matte coated small areas such as exhausts.

I had a lot of fun adding the decals to the Buccaneer. I did find it a bit nerve wracking though and I didn’t add all of them. I left many of the smaller decals off but I doubt many people would notice and it doesn’t bother me much anyway.

Because I was entering the Buccaneer into a anti-shipping themed campaign I decided on arming it with a television guided Martel anti-ship missile. The white pod you can see in the picture above is a Data Acquisition Pod which works in conjunction with T.V Martels. For a reason I no longer remember it was necessary for the pod to be mounted backwards. The T.V Martel was the anti-shipping weapon of choice for the Royal Navy and RAF until the 1980’s when the Sea Eagle came into service. The Sea Eagle is a fire and forget missile with over four times the range of the Martel.

I only added the one T.V Martel to the Buccaneer and left the other two pylons free. I gleamed a lot of information about the Buccaneer and particular weapons options from the website blackburn-buccaneer.co.uk which is an amazing website filled with every piece of information about the Buccaneer you could possibly want.

Throughout the build I kept putting off work on the cockpit because; unfortunately, it came with decals for consoles. I don’t like decals in the cockpit because I find it a tight and awkward area to work in and besides if the consoles are moulded plastic then I have the opportunity to paint them in a more attractive and interesting manner than they would be appear realistically. I always claim ‘artistic license’ when it comes to the cockpit.

Unfortunately decaling the cockpit was nothing short of a disaster and after a couple of failed attempts and damaged decals I decided it best be left alone. I did add the two pilots that came with the kit; though, in order keep it looking busy rather than bare. Since then I’ve painted all of my pilots in the same fashion as those in the Buccaneer and I’ve grown to like the generic Airfix pilots for that reason.

My ‘Achilles Heel’ when it comes to any aircraft is the canopy and the Buccaneer was no different. I started out by applying liquid mask on the clear areas and then; rather foolishly, I primed the entire canopy. After I had finished painting the frames, inside and out, I began peeling back the liquid mask only to find it had reacted with the primer and become flaky. Soon my frames were Extra Dark Sea Grey speckled with white flakes that I couldn’t get off easily. To make matters worse I couldn’t remove the liquid mask from the inside of the canopy.

To make a long story short the canopy was completely ruined. So I quickly went out and bought a second Airfix kit and I swapped the canopies. It wasn’t a total loss; I now have a second Buccaneer to build sometime which I’ll do up as a Gulf War Buccaneer S.2B. I’ll also be using the age-old modelling trick of hiding the canopy under a tarp. After all under the hot Middle Eastern sun you would want to keep the cockpit cool before the flight crew gets in, right?

The Buccaneer S.2D was finished just in time for the campaign deadline on Aeroscale and netted me a nice reward ribbon for my profile; that’s a neat feature on Aeroscale and its sister sites, well worth checking out.

It now resides on the top shelf of my display case as the first model aircraft I ever finished and the Blackburn Buccaneer has become one of my favourite aircraft in the process. One of these days I’ll be adding an RAF Buccaneer S.2B to the collection and; you never know, I might even be persuaded to do a SAAF Buccaneer S.Mk.50 one day as well.

The Blackburn Buccaneer: A Brief History

British military aviation during the Cold War was certainly impressive with many a beautiful and interesting an aircraft produced; both the Sea Vixen and the Sea Venom are a testament to the fact.

However there was one aircraft produced during the long war that was not only aesthetically brilliant but was so versatile and capable that it went on to serve for 30 years; the Blackburn Buccaneer.

The Buccaneer was designed specifically to combat Soviet fleet deployments which at the time had become quite a dangerous prospect for the Royal Navy. Requirement specifications called for the Buccaneer to fly at a height of 200 feet above the sea, below ship-borne radar, and deliver a mix of conventional and nuclear weaponry against the enemy fleet.

The Buccaneer S.Mk.1 entered service with the Royal Navy in 1962 and quickly became popular with crews. Underpowered engines troubled the new jet; however, causing take-off issues in certain weather conditions. Due to these engine troubles an uprated version of the Buccaneer, the S.Mk.2, was developed and entered service in 1964.

The Buccaneer would serve with the Fleet Air Arm for another 12 years until 1978 when the HMS Ark Royal was decommissioned ending fixed-wing aircraft service with the Royal Navy.

Notable events during its career include ‘Gunboat Diplomacy’ flights over Honduras successfully discouraging Guatemala from invading its neighbour after it gained independence. Buccaneers also bombed the shipwrecked oil tanker ‘Torey Canyon’ to ignite its cargo and prevent a major oil spill off the British coastline.

It was with the Royal Air Force that the Buccaneer would enjoy a long career. After the TSR-2 project was scrapped and the F-111K project was cancelled due to cost escalations the Royal Air Force was in an awkward position with no modern aircraft on the horizon which; as you can imagine, was a very undesirable situation during the Cold War.

In 1968 the RAF were offered the Buccaneer S.Mk.2B (S.2B in shorthand) which satisfied their needs. In RAF service the Buccaneer would provide both a land strike role and a nuclear weapon delivery role to which the aircraft was perfectly suited.

Now, if there was ever any concern in the United States military over the capabilities of British aircraft or their pilot training then the 1977 Red Flag exercise must have astounded them. Despite a lack of terrain following radar or modern avionics the Buccaneers skimmed the desert floor at a mere 50 feet, breached enemy air defences and hit their targets. In air-to-air trials the Buccaneers, fitted with the AIM-9 Sidewinder, scored many a kill on their American counterparts. It was also at Red Flag that the RAF began experimenting with the Buccaneer and laser guided bombs, something which would pay off in the future.

It wasn’t all a success for the Buccaneer however. In 1980 during a Red Flag exercise a Buccaneer crashed causing the death of its crew. The entire fleet was grounded pending an investigation which found severe metal fatigue surrounding the front wings which could’ve lead to potential failure as happened at Red Flag. Out of the 90 available aircraft only 60 were selected to undergo repairs and a squadron was disbanded in the process.

By the early 80’s the Panavia Tornado began coming into service with the RAF and took over land strike duties from the Buccaneer. The Buccaneer still had a role to play; however, and continued on with maritime strike duties. In this role it would be fitted with the powerful Sea Eagle anti-ship missile which could be considered the British equivalent to the French Exocet and the American Harpoon missiles.

The Tornado was never quite as popular with its crews compared with the Buccaneer; it had less range and it didn’t offer as smooth a ride at low levels. During Operation Desert Storm the RAF lost several Tornados during low level attack runs; Iraqi anti-air defences were stronger than anticipated. A decision was made to switch to higher level precision bombing but the Tornado was only wired for the TIALD pod and the RAF only had two at the time.

Twelve Buccaneers joined the operation, fitted with Pave Spike laser designator pods, and flew ahead of the Tornados designating targets. Initially they did only that; designating for other aircraft, but soon were fitted with laser guided bombs themselves and throughout their participation they dropped 48 LBG’s.

Sadly this would be the last notable actions for the Buccaneer fleet and in 1994 they were decommissioned from service after giving a good 30 years to the British military.

The only other military service to operate the Buccaneer was the South African Air Force which operated the S.Mk.50 variant from 1965 to 1991. With the SAAF the Buccaneer would be involved in Border War as well as regional conflicts.

Having stayed in service for over 30 years and having proven invaluable during modern conflicts such as the Gulf War, despite its age, I can only conclude that the Blackburn Buccaneer is one spectacular aircraft and certainly one of my favourite Cold War era jets.