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My first kit finished this year, almost in time for the 50th anniversary of the first F-16 flight - 1:72 F-16AM Fighting Falcon, no 1615, serial 61-630, 53rd Fighter Squadron "Warhawks", Romanian Air Force, Borcea AB 2023. This is an ex-USAF 83-1077 and ex-Portuguese 15134 aircraft, delivered to Romania in 2021 after refurbishing and repainting. I chose this camo just because I simply like it very much. It's also nice to see an old plane with all this modern equipment. Revell kit, CMK resin cockpit, Master metal Pitot tube, AOA probes and static dischargers, Hasegawa missiles, Eduard Sniper ATP and some scratch. Painted with Mr. Hobby C series paints. Decals are from ModelMaker set. Thanks for watching!

Dear fellow Britmodellers, here's my 1/72 Tamiya Bf-109 G6 in markings of the Romanian Air Force in 1945. Painted with acrylics from Mr.Hobby, photos by Wolfgang Rabel. I got this kit for birthday a few weeks ago - thank you, Gerhard! I built almost straigt from the box. My only additions are the headrest armor (a photo-etch part from Brengun) and the antenna under the fuselage (stretched black sprue). Markings are from DK Decals "Romanian Roundels Over Czechoslovakia" (DK72088). "Tumpi-Bumpi Flostomok" was the mount of Lt. Baciu from Grupul 1 Vanatorare, in May 1945. The Tamiya kit is clever in design and easy to build. The kits marking options, however, are rather drab, so I chose this colorful bird of the Romanian Air Force. The upper side camo was free-handed using my Harder & Steenbeck Evolution with 0,15mm nozzle. Thank you for your interest. Roman

A couple of photos with my model; Hobby boss kit and Eduard details. Trying to represents a Romanian Air Force machine from the 60's. The WIP topic: Feel free to comment! Best regards, Iulian

The IAR 80/81 was a small-series Romanian-built WW2 fighter plane. Only some 450 airframes were completed until the production was terminated, in September 1944. Built with very limited resources and under many unfortunate circumstances, the plane had to fight much more powerful air forces like VVS, USAF, and in the end against Luftwaffe, obtaining 315 confirmed air victories, for 75 of their own shot down by enemy fighters. The IAR 80 behaved pretty well during its operational life, especially considering that starting with 1942 its modest high-altitude fighting capabilities were falling behind those of enemy types. This problem had become critical during spring-summer 1944, when the IAR 80’s had to face the American bombing campaign over the Ploiesti oil refineries, and were forced to fight at very high altitudes, heavily outnumbered and outperformed. Despite this, over 80 heavies were shot down during 1943-1944 by IAR 80’s/81’s while defending the Ploiesti-Bucharest area and when deployed skillfully, on the rare occasions when the attacking forces were coming at low altitudes, it was still capable to deliver quite a punch, even against much more advanced fighters like the P38 Lightning. Of course, this came at a very high price – only during late spring/summer 1944, at least 32 Romanian pilots were KIA while fighting with IAR80’s/81’s against the American attacking forces coming from Italy. The machine depicted here is a very early IAR 80 from the first batch (1-20) – this is actually the second airframe assembled. Starting with August 1940 it was used as a test plane by Escadrila de experiente Pipera (the Test Squadron based at Pipera airfield) and flown by various pilots in order to improve the type/subsequent airframes. Then in spring 1941 it was allocated to a fighter unit (60th Fighter Squadron), completing many operational missions on the Eastern front, against Soviet Airforce . Later on, it was relegated to fighter training duties. This machine had served with distinction throughout the war and survived many accidents, only to be scrapped sometime in 1948, thus sharing the sad fate of the entire IAR 80/81 series. Not a single one was preserved in a museum. I used the 1/48 IAR 80 Hobbyboss kit as a base for the model, improving it the best I could. The Hobbyboss kit is a decent offering which comes together very well, although there are some issues most probably generated by sloppy documentation work. I described some of these issues in my build log here – however they can be surpassed with only a little bit of extra work and the most important thing is that even if built strictly OOB, this one will certainly look like an IAR 80. I also used the Yahu instrument panel for the early IAR 80, the Quickboost machine-gun barrels for IAR 80, and the decals from Radu Brinzan – all of them very good products which will greatly enhance the HB plastic kit. So, that’s it. It was an enjoyable build of an aircraft which is very dear to me. I hope you’ll like it. Thanks for looking and cheers,

Hi gents, since the new IBG Models kit is just fab so I could not resists my temptation to build it asap. So this is the finished article built OOB except few small mods to the base kit. The markings were sourced of my decal bank and the kit represents the Karas I No.2, one of the longest serving machine of this type in the Romanian Air Force (struck off charge in 1948). I believe there might be soon a reboxing with Romanian marking by IBG too, hope they will include some of the late-style camouflage colours. Cheers Libor

Hi folks, this is yet another addition to my growing Romanian AF collection. The Hasegawa kit was built OOB and the markings are combination of fabulous Radu B. decals and my own masks. Hurricane No.7 of Escadrila 53 was flown by Andrei Radulescu who claimed 3 kills (I-153) on 30 June 1941. After the initial campaign on the eastern front the remaining Romanian Hurricanes were sent for overhaul and were no longer used in the first line due to lack od spares and to avoid mistakes for AA gunners with Soviet Hurricanes. Cheers Libor

Hi fellow modellers, this is one of my long term projects I recently got finished. Whilst the original kit is pretty spot on as far as the main airframe specifics are concerned, the mouldings suffered from poor moulding quality. That means I completely reworked the surface, rescribed the panel lines and added the rivets. Most of details as cockpit, engine, canopy, undercarriage etc. were scratch built or heavily modified. The decals come from fabulous Radu B. decal sheet and since I was building one of the earlier machines with 4-guns wing, I opted for "42" which wore the unit score. Flown in August 1941 on Eastern Front by Escadrila 42/52, Grupul 5 Vanatoare. Cheers Libor

Hello, this is my interpretation of "Red 4" from Grupul 7/8 Vanatoare in spring 1945. The kit is 1/72 AZ Model Bf-109 G6 with photo etch from Brengun, vacu canopy from AML, pitot tube from Master Model and decals from RB Productions (http://www.radubstore.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=1_67). The aircraft was captured from retreating German forces in autumn 1944. All previous national insignia and theater markings were overpainted by the new operators. Note the overpainted Balkenkreuze on the upper wings and fuselage, the Swastika has been removed as well. The former yellow fuselage band has partly been covered with White, partly overpainted with RLM76 and additional motting applied. White wingtips added. The yellow lower cowl has been overpainted with RLM76 as well, but that wasn't done very carefully with the new paint roughly covering the cowl and some paint chipping too - a patchy affair. The tricolore on the rudder is painted on, I tried to capture the colour tone of the Roundels. A (quite blurry) photograph of this aircraft can be found here: http://www.me109.info/display.php?a=e&fid=8859 Photographs by: Wolfgang Rabel of IGM Cars & Bikes Thanks for your interest!