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F-5A Freedom Fighter

History

Designed primarily for air-to-ground in the 1950s, and built by Northrop, the F-5A/B Freedom Fighter and the F-5E/F Tiger II are part of a family of widely used light supersonic fighter aircraft. The F-5 was less complex than some contemporary aircraft such as the F-4 Phantom, and it was much cheaper to buy and operate, thus the F-5 became a popular aircraft on the export market.

The F-5A first flew in 1959 and entered service in the 1960s. Strengths included the aircraft's compact size, a high level of manoeuvrability, favourable flying qualities and a low accident rate. It also had a high sortie generation rate. Standard armament was 2 M39 20 mm cannons, with additional pods or missiles of up to 62,000lbs on 5 hardpoints and 2 wing tips. During the Cold War, over 800 were produced through 1972 for U.S. allies. While the USAF had no acknowledged need for a light fighter, it procured roughly 1,200 trainer aircraft of an F-5 derivative. The USAF, the Marine Corp, and the U.S. Navy have all used the F-5 as an aggressor aircraft to teach pilots air-to-air combat.

Construction

The first thing to note when you start building this kit is that the instruction guide is a whopping 34 pages, much of which is for the 16 marking options. To begin construction you must decide which version of the F-5A you wish to build. I choose to build the F-5A version. Note also that the kit is designed in a modular fashion with various inserts to support the differences in F-5As built for some countries. I found that when building the modules, the parts fit was pretty good. However, when connecting the modules together, the parts fit was not so good. A good deal of sanding and gap filling was required.

Take notice that when building the cockpit, the canopy mechanism is molded in the open position. If you want it closed, pieces need to be cut away. Additionally, there are no decals for the instrument panels, just raised detail. But, with careful painting you can have a cockpit that looks fairly real. The ejection seat came without seat belts, so I added some PE seat belts. I also added a lead weight to the nose cone. Following the illustrated construction guide, the kit goes together without too many hassles. I did a lot of test fitting, filling and sanding to obtain a good looking model.

Painting

My model here depicts USAF F-5A 63-8381 before its delivery to Greece in 1988. There were two paint schemes for this aircraft. One scheme was a complete bare metal finish. The second scheme had for the most part a bare metal finish. However, sections of the tail, wings, and nose were painted red. For the red areas I used Floquil Signal Red.

For the bare metal finish I first primed the area for the bare metal with a coat of Model Masters Gloss Black and let it dry and cure for 48 hours. I then polished the Gloss Black with polishing cloths. I then airbrushed three light coats of Alclad Airframe Aluminium over the Gloss Black. This is a new paint for me, and was very pleased with the bright shinny bare metal finish.

Decals

The kit decal sheets provide markings for 16 different aircraft. I choose to use the decals for USAF aircraft 63-8381 which are superb. They behaved well, settling nicely onto two coats of Future. I used a few touches of Solvaset on each decal to ensure the decal snuggled down to the model surface.

Comments

To sum up, this was a very good kit to build. It is reasonably well detailed out of the box, has some fit problems, but the finished model is a good looking model.