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Fairey Barracuda II - 810 Sqn Fleet air Arm, HMS ILLUSTRIOUS, British Eastern Fleet Aircraft flown by Lt Cdr AJB Forde RN, CO of no. 21 TBR Wing during the strikes on Sabang on 19 April 1944. Another WW2 70th Anniversary build! Frog's Barracuda is a truly ancient kit, first issued way back in 1964 so it celebrates its own anniversary this year, exactly 50 years old !. Mine is the more recent (!) 1974-76 issue (only 40 years then). 19 Apr 1944 - Operation Cockpit - A combined British, Australian, New Zealand, Dutch, French and US naval force of Barracudas, Corsairs, Hellcats, Dauntless' and Avengers attacks the Japanese naval facilities at Sabang in Sumatra. The Barracuda entered Fleet Air Arm service in January 1943 as a replacement for the Albacore and Swordfish. Designed initially as a torpedo bomber, its novel Fairey Youngman Flaps could be extended behind the wing and reversed to act as very effective dive brakes. It was in the Dive Bomber role that the Barracuda saw most success and proved most effective. Following their success against the Tirpitz in early April 1944, Barracudas were soon in action again with the Eastern Fleet and Operation Cockpit, the first joint UK-US operations against the Japanese, in what proved to be a precursor to the formation of the British Pacific Fleet. Operation Cockpit was a diversionary raid requested by the US to reduce pressure on their forces to the East. In return for the loan of HMS VICTORIOUS (as USS ROBIN) in 1943 to fill gaps in the US Carrier Fleet, the USS SARATOGA was assigned to the British Eastern Fleet for its first foray back into the Pacific Theatre. The successful raids were then followed up in May with Operation Transom, this time against Surabaya, Java, although for these raids, the Barracuda were replaced by Fleet Air Arm Grumman Avengers due to the Barracuda's marginal performance in the hot, humid and high environment over Java. This is my second build of this kit; the previous one was a Russian NovoExport re-issue in a horrible brown plastic. It had no decals, so I sourced a set of Techmod replacements for an Op Tungsten aircraft, but they also included this Eastern Fleet version. This is the original FROG version, which comes with some entirely passable decals for another Op Tungsten aircraft, plus a British Pacific Fleet aircraft. The FROG kit is reputed to have a number of "difficult to resolve" shape issues and suffers very badly from a lack of cockpit detail, not least the lack of any deck beneath that large canopy. In fact there is a general lack of detail throughout, but it goes together reasonably well and until fairly recently it was the only Barracuda kit available; for the vast majority of us it may still be the easiest and most practical way to add a "Barra" to our collections!. I have made a number of changes: most obviously the deck beneath the cockpit. I also added an arrestor hook (a strange omission), placed a metal gauze filter in front of the rather bare engine intakes, added the retractable manual deck handling frames below the wings and constructed the two Yagi array radar antenna for the wings (plastic strut and the bristles from a brush). The kit's torpedo armament was replaced by a full load of 5 bombs for the type's more normal dive bombing role. The white tape on the after deck is a strip of paper (although the Frog decals do suppy one)- these tapes were a local modification to allow the rear crew member to release the catch on the dinghy hatch before ditching, introduced after several incidents where fuselage distortion (and the fact it was underwater!) had prevented it happening afterward. This isn't really the best of kits, but hey..... it's 50 years old and it looks like a Barracuda to me FLY NAVY FredT