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SAAB Gripen

History

Manufactured by the Swedish aerospace company Saab, The JAS 39 Gripen is a single seat, single-engine multirole fighter aircraft. It was designed to replace the Swedish Air Force Saab 35 Draken and 37 Viggen The Gripen has a delta wing and canard configuration with fly-by-wire flight controls. Powered by the Volvo RM12 engine, it has a top speed of Mach 2.

The Gripen has good short takeoff performance, and can withstand the stresses of short landings. To decrease landing distance, the Gripen has a pair of air brakes located on the sides of the rear fuselage and canards that can angle downward to act as air brakes. Additionally, the Gripen is capable of flying at a 70-80 degrees angle of attack

The JAS-39 is an excellent low cost fourth-generation fighter. It is designed to be relatively cheap, easy to maintain and fight off any potential aggressor. These traits have made the Gripen an attractive prospect for many nations including Brazil, South Africa, Czech Republic, Hungary and Thailand.

The Kit

The Kitty Hawk JAS-39 A/C kit has a wealth of parts on eight sprues and some PE parts. The kit also includes two decal sheets with decals for four aircraft. Kitty Hawk provided a well illustrated instruction booklet with 21 steps, along with colored painting and marking guides for three aircraft.

Construction

Construction of the Kitty Hawk JAS-39 Gripen was straight forward just by following the instruction guide. The parts fit was pretty good, but a fair amount of seam filling was required. Obviously the air brakes located on the sides of the rear fuselage were designed to be in the open position. But, typically the air brakes are closed when the Gripen is on the tarmac. Mounting the air brakes in the closed position was a chore?they did not fit well. There were large gaps that required a good deal of putty and sanding.

The kit provides a lot of weapons for different missions of your choosing. However, I wanted to configure my Gripen as an air defense fighter, using four AIM-120 and two AIM-9 air-to-air missiles. I used the AIM-9s provided in the kit. But, the kit only provided two AIM-120s with a poor means of mounting the missiles. So, I dug into the spare parts cache for four AIM-120Cs along with matching missiles rails.

Painting

All paints for this model were Model Masters enamels.

• Landing gears    Flat White
• Wheel Bays   Flat White
• Wheel Bay Doors   Flat White
• Fuselage underside  Light Gray
• Nose cone     Light Gray
• Fuselage topside  Dark Blue Gray
• Missiles    Light Ghost Gray

  Decals

  The kit provides decals for four aircraft. I chose to use the decals for the Swedish Gripen, Test A/C 39A. The decals performed well even though they were quite thin. They were easily placed on the model and responded well to decal setting solution.

  Conclusion

  This was my first experience with a Kitty Hawk kit, and it was a good one. The parts fit was decent, the detail was quite good, and the decals were also good. I am pleased with finished model which encourages me to built another Kitty Hawk kit in the future.