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HELLER
& REVELL 1:72 MIRAGE III |
Reviewer:
Kevin Ronayne (klr@mis.nuigalway.ie)
Kit Review submitted:
27
August 2005
Date: 17th August, 2005
The Mirage III was part of the 'first generation' of Mach 2 Jet fighters designed in the mid-1950's, along with such other famous aircraft as the MiG-21, F-104 Starfighter, English Electric Lightning and Saab Draken. This was a period of very fast evolution in terms of aircraft technology and design, with a variety of radically different fighter configurations being researched in the quest for speed, and a good many of these made it to the production stage. Indeed, each of the five aircraft already mentioned had a quite distinct configuration. In the case of the Mirage III, this was the tailless delta wing layout, with an 'area ruled' fuselage. Among the other aircraft mentioned, only the Draken came even close, and that had a 'blended' wing/fuselage which was a markedly different concept.
Like all of the other aircraft mentioned, the Mirage III was originally designed for the interceptor role, but eventually found itself being pressed into service in the ground attack role. In this, the Mirage III was probably more successful than most of its competitors, despite the basic drawbacks of the tailless delta layout - poor manoeuvrability and high landing speeds. Of course, its main competitors were also hampered to some extent by their optimised design. While the Mirage III did not have the 'Superpower' advantage of MiG 21 or F-104, it nonetheless enjoyed considerable export success as well as in France. The successful employment of the Mirage III by Israel during the 1967 six-day war gave an obvious fillip to export sales.
Over 1,400 Mirage III's were built, with production only terminating in the early 1980's. A number of different variants were produced, including the dual-rule 'E' model designed for the fighter bomber role, and which introduced a 30cm 'plug' behind the cockpit to store extra avionics and fuel. There was also the simplified Mirage 5 which proved popular with poorer countries, and the more advanced Mirage 50 series. Israel commissioned the development of the Mirage 5, but the French government blocked the delivery of the aircraft, which eventually found their way into the Armee de l'Air. Having been refunded, the Israelis then copied the Mirage 5 without license as the Nesher, although suspicion of collusion by Dassault remains. Some 61 Neshers were built, some being later re-exported to Argentina and given the name Dagger. These saw combat in the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas conflict, where they were outclassed in the air superiority role by the Royal Navy Sea Harrier FRS.1's, the latter being equipped with the 'all-aspect' AIM-9L Sidewinder.
The Israelis also adopted the basic Mirage 5 design to produce the IAI Kfir, which was powered by the American J79 engine. It featured canard foreplanes, also fitted to some late model Mirage III's. Kfir production did not end until the late 1980's, with over 200 being built. Some Kfir-standard upgrades have been carried out on both South African and Chilean Mirage III's, the South African aircraft being renamed the Cheetah.
Although long since retired from French service, some 'genuine' Mirage III's are still in service around the world, almost 50 years after the aircraft was originally designed.
The Mirage III is not exactly the best-represented kit, at least in 1/72 scale. In my youth, I built both the Matchbox and Airfix kits, neither of which seemed to be world-beaters, and both were of the shorter 'C' version, if I recall correctly. The two kits being reviewed here probably date from the mid-1960's to the early 1970's - I suspect the Heller kit is a few years older, mainly on the basis that a French company would be quicker off the mark for one of their own aircraft. Pioneer Models has kits of the Dagger/Nesher. Given my limited knowledge of PM kits, I would guess that this tooling is (at best) no better than any of the other four Mirage III kits that I have now built. The newer AML tooling is also something of an unknown quantity to me, and I think covers the 'B' and 'C' versions. The best hope for a true top-quality tooling would appear to come from Eduard, who might decide to scale down their excellent 1/48 scale kits sometime in the future - although that only covers the 'C' version at present. Both Italeri and Hasegawa have kits of the Kfir in 1/72 scale.
The Heller kit is one I remember from my early modelling days, although I never got around to building it back in the early 1980's. I remember the box proclaiming '6 versions and 3 decorations'. The kit actually builds 3 versions, the 6 was just undercarriage up or down for each version. The three versions are mainly distinguished by their different nose profiles, and the subjects are:
No dates or bases are given. The kit I built was bought in the early 1990's, but I believe the current boxing is identical apart from the new (and inferior) artwork. In the case of the Spanish version, the full designation should be IIIEE (the second E for Espana) - that's why the Belgian aircraft is designated 5BA. The kit has 54 parts, and is molded mostly in standard light grey with mostly raised detail. Despite the age of the mold, the mold still appears in good condition, with the proviso that my kit was produced some 15 years ago. There were a couple of problems which I will deal with during the build review stage. The only stores supplied are two sets of under wing tanks, large and small (more thin than small) sizes. The instructions are on a four-page A4 leaflet, with Heller and Humbrol paint codes - the former have presumably now been deleted, if other Heller kits are anything to go by.
This kit was not readily available from some years, but is now back as part of a Heller reissue drive. The kit currently has a list price on Hannants of just STG £6.
The Revell kit - really a Monogram kit - was unknown to me until last year, when it appeared on the Hannant's web site (cost: STG £8). I have not seen it listed on the Revell Germany web site, and the 4-page instruction leaflet is unusual in having no background information. Also, the paint/decal guides are printed on the front page. In all these respects, this kit is similar to the Revell/Monogram F-101 Voodoo kit, but the two kits are quite distinct when it comes to mold quality. This is an old kit, again with mainly raised panel detail. It is molded in a horrible shade of very dark blue. This is obviously linked to the French 'Bicentennial' scheme illustrated on the cover, but it serves no useful purpose whatsoever. Anyway, the blue colour on the scheme in question is obviously much lighter. Apart from the '1789-1989' scheme for a Mirage IIIE, there is also a Mirage III option for which a different nose is provided.
As with the Heller kit, there are two sets of wing tanks supplied. In this case, the thinner tanks each double up as double tandem bomb pylons, a very unusual arrangement indeed. There is also a tandem centreline bomb pylon. Accordingly, the kit included ten bombs to be fitted to the available points. Two Sidewinder missiles are also included, as well as full engine! There are 89 parts in total. As with the Heller kit, mold quality is generally good, except for problems in the exact same area as that kit. More later.
The Revell kit cost STG £8 from Hannants.
The current Heller box art. I much preferred the previous artwork.
I had originally intended to build this kit as the Spanish IIIE version, with wheels down. However, I found that some of the undercarriage legs were not properly molded - this is the problem I alluded to earlier. So I had to build the kit wheels up. I can only assume that the newest production batch does not suffer from this problem.
Construction was mostly straightforward for two reasons: the low number of parts, and generally good fit overall. The cockpit is predictably quite basic, consisting of a single-piece 'bath' with narrow side panels, and extending back to incorporate the roof and rear bulkhead of the nose wheel bay - the Mirage F.1CR kit had exactly the same design. There is a reasonable looking ejection seat, and a simple control stick and instrument panel.
Moving swiftly along, the first real issue of note is with the wings. The Heller designers engineered the wings properly, with a central lower section, and port and starboard upper wings with full fore and aft control surfaces molded onto these. However, the join between the front of the central to the completed fuselage was somewhat unsatisfactory, and required some work and effort to get the part into shape so that they would mate properly. Note: as is my wont, I fully assembled the wings before mating this unit with the fuselage. By the way, it goes without saying that for a wheels up model, the main undercarriage doors need to be attached to the lower wing section before attaching the upper wings, or else it gets a little bit tricky. I just thought I'd mention it, although any modeller with any amount of experience will know this anyway.
The join between nose and fuselage required some filler, as did the navigation radar fairing - that's the bulge underneath the windscreen on the 'E' version. Incidentally, the lower nose section for the 'R' version is molded as a transparent part, allowing you to simply paint over everything except the camera ports. This is a standard Heller design feature, and a very good one in my view. The engine intakes are as usual each supplied in two parts - splitter plate and fairings. It would not be a true Heller kit unless the instructions managed to mix up these parts in terms of which is port and which starboard. To be honest, I have had this problem with Heller kits so often that now when I see the first sign of trouble, I just throw the offending parts in the air and ignore the part numbers. That's what I did here, relying on part fit, panel lines, diagrams and photographs to get things right. In this case, the fairings are easy to get right because of the gun port channels on the underside. The front part of the undercarriage door as molded to represent two overlapping sections, so I had to fashion a replacement part from plastic card.
Although the cover artwork from my kit shows the Spanish version fitted with the smaller, narrower wing tanks, the instructions specify the larger tanks, and these are what I fitted. The kit provides two rear ventral fairings - a larger unit for the 'E' and 'R' subjects, and a smaller unit for the 5 version, which also comes with an arrestor hook. The larger, more common unit is a fuel tank. In early versions of the Mirage III, a supplementary rocket motor was fitted in this position, but its use was eventually discontinued.
On to painting: the Spanish aircraft uses the 'basic' French scheme, which I already had to deal with during my recent Mirage F.1C project. Consistently, Heller specify Hu 27 dark grey and Hu 102 medium green as the upper camouflage scheme. As was the case with the Mirage F.1, I substituted Revell 57 medium blue-grey for Hu 27, on the grounds that Hu 27 seemed far too dark, and the Revell colour gave a much more realistic 'weathered' finish. Interestingly, in the Revell kit itself, Revell 47 'matt mouse grey' is suggested as the blue-grey colour for this camouflage scheme. Without wishing to further repeat myself, my decision on colours was based on viewing (literally) hundreds of photographs of French jets on www.airliners.net. I should also repeat the fact that newer Heller instructions for the Mirage 2000N depart from the Heller 'standard' French jet colours.
I painted the undersides with Humbrol Metalcote dull aluminium, which is a better option than the Hu 56 'plain' aluminium specified in the kit. The underside colour (or colours) on French jets is another area of uncertainty for me, and one that I really need to do more research on before I build many more such aircraft.
A final note on colours: the Belgian Mirage 5BA subject sports a quite different scheme to the 'standard' scheme of the French and Spanish aircraft. The upper camouflage colours suggested by Heller are Hu 91 black green (RLM 70 for WW II Luftwaffe kits), Hu 93 sand, and Hu 80 bright green. The underside is a 50:50 mix of Hu 90 Sky (RAF underside colour) and Hu 34 white. I suspect that the upper camouflage is the same tactical scheme used by Belgian F-104's. The Starfighter feature in Vol. 2 of 'Wings of Fame' notes that this scheme was unique to Belgium, but the same feature also includes plates of both Turkish and Jordanian F-104's which appear to show the same scheme. The Italeri (ex ESCI) F-104G kit includes a Belgian subject, for which the upper scheme is FS34079 dark green (Hu 116), FS34097 medium green (Hu 105) and FS30219 brown (Hu 118). This seems to be a subtle variation on the standard USAF tactical scheme, which used FS34102 (Hu 117) as the medium green colour, instead of the slightly darker FS34097. As for the underside colour on the Mirage 5BA - I have no real idea at present, but I intend to find out if I ever build that version ...
The decal sheet is a typical Heller production, with the good and bad points. On the minus side, the French and Belgian roundels are way out of register. This was not the reason that I chose to build the Spanish subject by the way - I wanted to build a standard Mirage IIIE from the outset, and that dictated the Spanish subject. The decals were otherwise very good, as they were very thin, adhered very well, and gave a seamless finish once coated with Xtracolor matt varnish which I applied over the entire camouflaged upper surfaces.
And that is that! As this is a comparative review, the accuracy issues will be dealt with later.
© Kevin Ronayne 2005
I am not really a fan of 'celebration' schemes, but I decided in this case to model the bicentennial scheme, so that I would have two completely different looking kits.
I had originally intended to build this kit 'wheels down', but I had exactly the same problem as with the Heller kit, in that some of the undercarriage leg parts were not properly formed. This was a pity, as these parts are noticeably more detailed than those in the Heller kit, although the main wheel bays on both kits are much too shallow. The cockpit appeared to be marginally better than the Heller offering, but the key word here is marginal. An detailed instrument panel decal is included, but I didn't use it as it wouldn't have fitted properly. The kit includes an option to attach the canopy in the raised position, but this is not really a runner as the frame of the canopy is molded onto the fuselage instead of the canopy part itself! Neither the canopy or the windscreen were great fits.
I felt had no option than to include the full engine block, even though I wouldn't be able to see any of it once the kit was complete. Anyway, it didn't matter as I knew at an early stage the kit would be built with retracted undercarriage. If the wheels were down, it would have been a different matter, as I would have had to somehow omit most of the engine to avoid producing a 'tail sitter'.
The wing engineering in this kit is different to the Heller kit, in that there is just a single piece wing for each side - no central section. The wings do not attach precisely to the fuselage, and I had to take great care to get the angle of wing 'droop' that I wanted. Once everything had finally set, I had to apply a large amount of filler to the roots, particularly on the upper side. Unlike the Heller kit, there is no option for the rear ventral fuel tank - it is the standard large unit, molded into each fuselage half. The engine intakes are again supplied as two parts each, and the fit was really very poor, both in terms of splitter to intake, and completed sub assembly to fuselage. A lot of sanding, shaping and filler was required for this stage.
The nose fit was also very poor, as the single part nose cone appeared to be quite crudely molded. Yet more filler was required here. The reconnaissance version has a two-part nose - upper and lower sections like the Heller kit, but the lower part is not molded from transparent plastic in this case. I fitted the ventral navigation radar fairing, even though the instructions suggest that it only be fitted to the reconnaissance ('R') version, and not the 'E' - this is the exact reverse of the Heller kit. Yet again, the fit was poor, more so than for the Heller kit.
The wing air brakes (both upper and lower) are closed on this kit, as they are on the Heller kit.
As I was modelling the bicentennial aircraft, I had no need to use most of the external stores. The kit instructions imply that this subject would have been carrying external weapons, but somehow I doubt it. The 'R' version wouldn't have been carrying these stores either. I assume these stores are really more appropriate for whatever 'E' subject was included in previous boxings of the kit. Another point of note is that the French would presumably have stopped using the Sidewinder once the Matra Magic missile became available in the 1970's. The Sidewinders in this kit are a bit crude, but look like the 'B' version that the French would have used. When Sidewinders (or Magics) were carried on the Mirage III, the pylons were 'grafted' onto the fairing for the outboard elevon jack, and the kit includes fairings with and without the pylon, although these parts feature prominent sink marks. I have no idea how accurate the bombs are, and I can only guess their nominal weight as being either 200 or 250 KG.
I used the smaller, thinner type of wing tank - the one that would have doubled up as a pylon - rather than the larger finned type.
The paint scheme and decals naturally go together for the special scheme that I had chosen. The first point is that the large white section decals are not opaque. I had suspected this beforehand, so I made sure to undercoat these areas with two coats of white paint. The next problem was the blue colour. I have to blame myself for not thinking here, as I decided to follow the Revell instructions to the letter and use Revell 350 Lufthansa Blue, which I had to go out and buy. Of course, this colour is much too dark, but I can partly excuse myself on the grounds that the blue boundary and background on some of the decals is itself too dark. There was no question of removing the offending Revell 350, as this would mess up the decals, so I had to overpaint it with the much lighter Hu 14 French Blue, which was the same colour I used for the Patrouille de France scheme on my Heller Magister kit. Rereading that review, I can see how much (apparent) uncertainty there is about the blue colour on French 'Tricolor' schemes.
The underside was painted the same as the Revell kit, i.e. Humbrol Metalcote dull aluminium. The Revell instructions say the underside of the camouflaged IIIR subject should be painted aluminium, but that of the 1789/1989 aircraft should be painted light grey (Revell 374). The pictures on the side of the Revell box seem to confirm this, showing the underside a light blue-grey, contrasting with the bare metal finish of the wing tanks. This seems to be consistent with some later Heller instructions, but it made no difference to me. At this point, I was getting rather fed up with this kit, and having chosen my finish, I decided to stick with it.
© Kevin Ronayne 2005
A keys issue is not so much the basic accuracy of each kit, but the way in which the kit design and engineering makes it hard or easy to build an accurate kit. This applies specifically to the wings, which have a slight amount of anhedral ('droop'). The Heller kit has the clear edge, as the wing design makes it very easy to attach the wings at the correct angle. Indeed, it is almost impossible to get the Heller kit wrong because of the use of the central lower wing, and the excellent fit of the wing to fuselage assemblies. This is the obvious way to design any kit of an aircraft with a high or low wing, but Revell did not do this, and since the single part wings are not a tight fit, it might be difficult to work out the precise angle at which the wings should be positioned. Indeed, as I pointed out in the build review, setting the Revell wings at the correct angle leaves a considerable gap to be filled in above the upper wing root.
The next issue is the distinctive cambered leading edge on the wings, which results in a second, slight 'droop' effect. I think both kits capture this effect quite well. The third main issue is the 'area ruled' profile of the fuselage, which I again I think is reproduced properly in both kits.
As I see it, these are the main areas of concern. When it comes to the level of precision and detail - in terms of say, panel lines - then the two kits are very close. However, the Revell kit is definitely let down by a number of crudely molded parts with consequent poor fit - the canopy, windscreen, engine intakes, nosecone and undercarriage doors being the main culprits.
There are some interesting issues. Each kit has a large finned wing fuel tank and a smaller, thinner fuel tank. But the large tanks in each kit are not the same, and neither are the smaller tanks. The large tanks in the Revell kit are 'T-finned', whereas the large Heller tanks have flat fins that droop, and the Heller tanks are bigger anyway. Which is correct? I think both are. From my limited references, I think the Revell tanks are 1,300 litre units, and the Heller tanks have a 1,700 litre capacity. I can't easily verify that the dimensions of each tank are correct, as I haven't seen the details published.
In the case of the smaller tanks, the Heller units are longer than the Revell equivalents, especially ahead of the pylons, and the Revell tanks are also bomb pylon racks to boot. I have only seen one very old picture of the latter type of tank, on an Australian Mirage IIIEO. This is probably due to the practice of carrying bombs on external tanks being long been out of favour, although it is still done with conformal tanks, such as those on the F-15E. The 'Heller' tank is seen much more often, which isn't really surprising.
Another point is the way in which the wing pylons should probably slope inwards because of the droop of the wings, assuming that they are indeed mounted at right angles to the wing surface. This isn't made clear in the instructions for either kit. At any rate, the fuel tank pylons are so low that the effect might be hard to see anyway.
Even allowing for the age of both kits, there are a number of feature that could have been included. Extra stores and appropriate pylons is one area. Neither kit includes the composite Matra rocket pod/fuel tank, something which I can only recall seeing in the Airfix Mirage III and Matchbox Jaguar kits - perhaps it was in the Heller Jaguar kit as well. At one point, I toyed with the idea of fitting a Matra R.530 AAM or Martel ASM to the centreline of the Heller kit. However, I wasn't happy that I could scratchbuild the correct pylon in either case, and I couldn't properly assess the likelihood of the Spanish IIIE subject actually carrying either of these weapons.
The final point relates to the kink at the base of the fin which was seen on some Mirage III's. This was a fairing which housed a High Frequency antenna. While it was fitted to most of the early Mirages, it seems to only have been fitted to some of the exported Mirage IIIE's.
I have a definite preference for the Heller kit, mainly for the reasons mentioned in the previous section. It is considerably easier to build a reasonably accurate kit with the Heller tooling, even though the lack of stores would be something of a problem for some potential subjects.
As with my Mirage F.1 review, I had little printed material to go on, and relied mainly on some old magazines and books from the early 1980's. A full cutaway diagram came courtesy of An Illustrated Anatomy of the World's Fighters, telling me just what every part of the aircraft was called!
An excellent history of the Mirage III family can be found at Greg Goebels web site. This is where I got most of my background information from. I thoroughly recommended this site.
As usual, the best source of pictures is www.airliners.net, where there are several hundred Mirage III/5 1 images available. Use the photos home page for easy access to the photographic database.
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