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.