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Latin American Kfir C10 (K48048) 1:48 Kinetic Model via Luckymodel.com The Kfir is an Israeli development of the Dassault Mirage III, which was used by the Israelis successfully as a Mach 2 all-weather interceptor, but the they felt that it lacked the loiter time that would be needed if a ground-attack role that had been envisaged was added its list of tasks. As a result of an arms embargo, Israel first built the Nesher, an unlicensed copy of the Mirage 5, which was then improved further still, and was suitably different from the Nesher to justify renaming it as the Kfir, which means ‘Lion Cub’ in Hebrew. It entered service in 1975, and was almost immediately superseded in the air superiority role when the first F-15s arrived from America, even though it remained in service, equipping several squadrons of the Israeli Air Force in other roles. The C10 variant was an export specific type, based upon the C7 that had more hardpoints added under the air intakes, a new engine with more thrust, in-flight refuelling probe, plus many upgrades to the avionics that included HOTAS capabilities and MFD screens embedded in the instrument panel. It was sold to South American operators, and was also known as the Kfir CE in Ecuadorean service with 24 airframes based on upgraded earlier models, and Kfir COA in Colombian service, some new airframes and some upgraded from C2 standard by Israel. It continued in service with the Israelis into the late 90s, after which it was replaced by more modern aircraft, but many are still on strength, whilst being offered for sale to potential purchasers with an upgrade and generous guarantee of aircraft that have been essentially returned to zero-hours. Argentina originally intended to buy a batch of Kfirs, but after much negotiation, nothing has materialised after many years. The Kit This is a reboxing with additional parts of an original Kinetic tooling from 2013, depicting this fairly niche variant of the Kfir in Latin American operation. The kit arrives in a traditional blue themed Kinetic top-opening box with a painting of a pair of Kfirs on patrol over jungle and a smattering of patchy white clouds obscuring the ground. Inside the box are ten sprues in medium grey styrene, two clear sprues, a decal sheet and the instruction booklet, which is printed in greyscale and has greyscale profiles for the decal options in the rear. The instructions state that colour profiles are supposed to be online, but the kit doesn’t yet appear on Kinetic’s site, so patience will be a virtue if the ones below aren’t sufficient for your needs. Detail on the kit is good, and the weapons includes are generous in number, with decals printed by an industry leader with utmost quality. Construction begins with the cockpit, starting with the seat that is built from five parts, with a HUD made from three clear parts for later use on top of the instrument panel, although someone has accidentally forgotten to paste the image of the HUD into that later step, leaving the arrows hanging in mid-air. Four small intakes are made up from two halves for use later, with the part numbers reused at the time to ensure you remember them, just don’t lose them in the meantime. The three-part rear bulkhead of the cockpit is also made up for later use before the seat, control column, rudder pedals and a choice of two instrument panels is inserted into the cockpit tub, adding the HUD from the invisible diagram once everything is painted. Note that there is no decal included for either the CE or C10 panels, but the detail of the parts is excellent, so you should be able to pick them out to make a good rendition of it. Also note that they are shown as parts H21 and H22, when they are in fact J21 and J22 on the sprues. The three gear legs are also made up in advance, each one a single part with three-part wheel, and the nose gear having twin landing-lights and other detail parts added, with its bay made from three parts with lots of moulded-in detail visible. In order to close up the fuselage, the intake trunks are first made up from two halves that hide the seams well, the exhaust is built from trunk with afterburner details moulded into the forward wall and a crisp exhaust ring fixed to the rear, and the nose cone with sensor blisters and pitot installed once the two halves have been joined. With all these sub-assemblies built and painted, the fuselage closing procedure is started by drilling a pair of holes within an oval marking on the top of each half, then sliding the intake trunks in through the cut-out in the fuselage sides, adding the external fairings in the next step. The cockpit, rear bulkhead, nose gear bay and nose itself are all mated with the fuselage during closing, after which attention turns to the delta wings. The lower wing is full span, and several holes are drilled out before adding the upper wings and their air-brakes to it, followed by the clear wingtip lights, one on each wing. The various flap actuator fairings are glued to the underside on pins, with the flying surfaces also attached by pins, plus more air-brakes underneath. If you wish to depict the flying surfaces dropped, you use a set of angled fairings instead of the straight ones, giving your model a little extra visual interest in the process. Returning to an inverted fuselage, the exhaust is slotted into the aft fuselage, a circular fan part blanks off the intake trunking after it merges within the fuselage, and the canards are fitted to the engine nacelles using slots and tabs, with a narrow insert under the nacelles. A host of antennae, aerials and two of the intakes made earlier are dotted around the fuselage and tail, differing slightly between variants, and then the wings are added from below, bearing in mind that the C10 late version had a small cut-out in the leading edge of the fin. You also get an option of posing the canopy open by leaving the tab on the rear, which slots into the spine. It doesn’t state whether you need to cut that off to pose it closed, so check by test fitting it in position once you have glued the windscreen in place. The main gear legs are inserted into the well detailed bays, adding a zig-zag actuator leg plus two bay doors, and the nose gear differs only by the location of the doors, and the fact that is has a single straight strut fitted between the leg and gear bay roof. More antennae, exhaust outlets, the remaining two intakes made early in the build, and a choice of inserts under the cockpit are fitted to the undersides, and a choice of two sensor bundles under the tail are provided, although the arrow showing where they go has been omitted, but it is visible on the profiles centred under the exhaust butted up to a moulded-in fairing on the belly. Each decal option carries a long refuelling probe on top of the starboard engine nacelle, and although it is on one of the sprues, it isn’t mentioned on the instructions. The profiles or your references will guide you here, and it is a butt-fit so plenty of test-fitting to find the right location may be needed. The model itself is complete by this stage, leaving only the weapons and additional fuel tanks to be built. There are two styles of tank with different tail fins and pylons for under the wings, plus a single tank for under the belly, plus a pair of Rafael Derby and Python 5 air-to-air missiles for engaging the enemy. The missiles are each made from a single body with two sets of fins and steering vanes moulded-in, and the perpendicular fins separate parts that fit into slots in the body. There are also other weapons on the sprues for the Red Flag airframe, such as the GBU-49 and the AN/AAQ-28 Litening Pod, but these aren’t shown being built. The GBU-49s are shown on the instructions for the earlier C2/C7 variant however, which you can find here on Scalemates. The profiles include painting and stencil information to guide you for all the munitions and pods used in this boxing, making for a nicely detailed weapon load-out. Markings There are three decal options on the busy sheet, which is separated into sections pertinent to each variant, plus common stencils and weapons stenciling. From the box you can build one of the following: Kfir CE FAE 905, Escuadron de Combate 2113, Taura Air Force Base, Ecuador, 2006 Kfir C10(EW) FAC 3056, Escuadron de Combate 111, Palanqueros Air Force Base, Colombia, April 2011 Kfir C10 FAC 3060, Escuadron de Combate 111, Red Flag 2018 Participant Decals are designed by FCM Decals and printed by Cartograf, which is a guarantee of good registration, sharpness and colour density, with a thin gloss carrier film cut close to the printed areas. Conclusion An attractive boxing of an attractive aircraft in South American service that should build up into a detailed replica. A few mistakes in the instructions could trip you up, but this review covers most if not all of them, so forewarned is forearmed. As well as being available from Lucky Model in Hong Kong, you can now select UK, USA, Australia, and Malaysia with local shipping when purchasing your model, as Kinetic now have local warehouses in these locations to reduce the postage costs for us modellers. Highly recommended. Review sample courtesy of

Mirage IIIDP/5SDD/5DM/Nesher T (MKM144133) 1:144 Mark I Models The Dassault Mirage III is one of the most recognisable aircraft to emerge from the Dassault Aviation stable in post war France with its distinctive delta wings and sharply pointed nose. The Mirage III grew out of French government studies for a light weight all weather interceptor able to reach an altitude 18,000 meters (59,500+ ft) in six minutes and able to reach Mach 1.3 in level flight. The tail less delta combined the wing with an area ruled Coke bottle-shaped fuselage to achieve such speed, minimising buffeting and other compressibility related issues that had plagued early supersonic designs. The Mirage IIIC would remain in French service from 1961 until 1988, and the largest export customer for the Mirage III was Israel, operating the Mirage IIICJ that had less advanced avionics and some aspects of the design removed or simplified. Nevertheless, Israel found these aircraft and weapons systems more than a match for anything her neighbours were able to field during the Six-Day and Yom Kippur wars, with the aircraft being a resounding success in combat with Syrian, Jordanian and Egyptian aircraft, many of which were of Soviet origin. Israel then sold some of these aircraft to Argentina when they had been replaced by more modern designs. The IIIDP was a short-run of five two-seat airframes that were built for the Pakistani Air Force, although they were used in other roles too. The Mirage 5 was externally similar to the Mirage III, but with a long slim nose that differentiates it from its earlier stable-mate, while the Nesher T was an Israeli development from the Mirage 5, the T variant predictably being the two-seat trainer, Nesher meaning Vulture. The Kit This is a reboxing with new decals of a recent tool from Mark I, originating in 2019, with new parts in 2022. It arrives in a small end-opening box with a profile of the Israeli Nesher T on the front, and the decal options printed on the back. Inside are three sprues of dark grey styrene, a small clear sprue, and instruction sheet on folded A4 in colour, with profiles on the rear that show all aspects of the camouflage for completeness. The four decal options are differentiated by their tail fin fillet, and there are three unused fuselage halves and a few other spare parts on the sprues, which are marked on the diagram in grey overprinting. Detail is good, and I’m starting to sound like a broken record when I marvel at the amount of it that the designers can squeeze into these small-scale kits. Construction begins with the cockpit, which is made in two portions, starting with the front seat on an L-shaped floor that receives the seat and control column, with another in the rear on a shallow floor with a partial bulkhead below at the rear. The pilot’s instrument panel has a decal with dials applied, and the rear seater’s panel is depicted by another decal that is applied to the back of the pilot’s bulkhead. With the cockpit painted, the exhaust is made up from top and bottom halves with a cylindrical tip and a bulkhead on which to mount it that ledges on a rib inside the fuselage. The fuselage can be closed up then, installing the intakes from splitter and trunk on each side of the rear cockpit and gluing the single part wings under the fuselage. The afore-mentioned fin fillet is cut from the third fuselage half and added to the fin for three decal options after removing the moulded-in section, all of which is marked in red. The canopy is a single crystal-clear part, and fits over the cockpit cut-out in the closed position, showing off your work in there, and slotting the pitot into the tip of the nose. The three landing gear struts are all one part each, and each has a wheel fixed to the axle, with captive bay doors on the main legs, and two smaller doors on the nose, which also has a captive door moulded into the front of the leg. A strake under the rear of the aircraft is removed using your favourite method of destruction, to be replaced by a new one from the sprues after making good. While you have the styrene removal tools out, if you are planning on using the Sidewinders, you will need to remove the forward section of the outer flap actuator fairing before fitting the pylon to the front of it. The AIM-9s are fixed to the rails after gluing two extra fins to the rear, then the characteristic gas tanks under the wings are made up, with a choice of a single part, or the three-part option with aerodynamic fins at the rear, their location shown in dotted red lines on the drawing. The last part is a twin landing light that is fitted to the nose gear strut, with a frontal scrap diagram showing the location and the correct angle of the gear legs to assist you. Markings There are four options included on the sheet, which will dictate the correct fin fillet you apply during construction, with plenty of variation in schemes and operators. From the box you can build one of the following: IAI Nesher T (Vulture), c/n T-05, Black 625, No.144 ‘Defenders of Arava’ Sq. (144 Tayeset), Israeli Air Force (Kheil HaAvir), Etzion Air Base (Bacha 10), Sinai, Israel, 1975 AMD Mirage IIIDP, s/n 67-301, Black 301, No.7 (TA) ‘Bandits’ Sq., No.32 (Tactical Attack) Wing, Pakistan Air Force (Pakistan Fiza’ya), Masroor Air Base, Pakistan, 2017-18 AMD Mirage 5SDD, c/n 2005, Black 2005, “Royal Saudi Air Force”, a/c purchased by Saudi Arabia on behalf of Egypt for service with the EAF (Egyptian Air Force), AMD plant, Bordeaux-Mérignac Airport, France, 1974 Mirage 5DM, c/n 202, Black M202, No.211 Sq., 21st Fighter-Attack Wing, Zaire Air Force (Force Aérienne Zaïroise, FAZ), Kamina Air Base, Zaire, late 1970s The decals are printed in good registration, sharpness and colour density, split into subjects by dotted lines, with a number of stencils provided despite the small scale. Conclusion A great new boxing of this two-seat supersonic trainer/fighter that saw a great deal of service with smaller operators in the 70s and beyond. The detail is good, decal options interesting, although the pitot probe would look better replaced by some fine brass rod for scale. Highly recommended. Review sample courtesy of

IAI Kfir TC.2. Provision was made for the second seat by removing a fuel tank and moving some avionics to the nose. The nose is longer and canted down for a better pilot view. Full combat capability was retained. Pics thanks to Dov.

This was the Israeli version of the Mirage 5. Pics thanks to Dov.

Israel Aircraft Industries Lavi (Young Lion) Developed in the 1980s as a 4th Gen Fighter, was cancelled mainly due to cost overruns. Pics from the Israeli Air Force Museum thanks to Dov.

Source: http://s362974870.on...howtopic=253907 V.P.

Openly presenting in ARC forums the Wingman Models philosophy and how they intend to improve their products, the brand co-owner, Andreas Klein, announced a IAI two seats Kfir 1/48th conversion set, so most probably for the TC.2 & TC.7/.10. Source: http://www.arcforums.com/forums/air/index.php?showtopic=271175&view=findpost&p=2577088 V.P.

As usual, do I've to say, the Kinetic's German partner, Wingman Models (http://wingmanmodels.com/wm/Pulsar/en_US.CMS.display.65./superior-military-aviation-model-kits-accessories), is to rework the chinese new 1/48th Dassault Mirage IIIE/O/R kit (http://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.php?/topic/234959104-148-kinetic-mirage-iii5/) to propose a family of IAI Nesher/Dagger & Finger in its Superkits range (http://wingmanmodels.com/wm/Pulsar/en_US.Store.display.80./superkits) - ref.WK48013. Source: https://www.facebook.com/wingmanmodels And what about the two-seats versions from these fighters? Considering Wingman Models has already released the two-seat variant from the Kfir, the TC.2 (http://wingmanmodels.com/wm/Pulsar/en_US.Store.display.151./wmk48011-israeli-air-force-kfir-tc2-superkit)... Wait and see. V.P.

Source: https://www.facebook.com/Kineticmodel IAI Kfir C.1/F-21A - ref.48083 V.P.