This set is intended for the CH-47D and it includes lots of cool parts to make a modern U.S. Army chopper look very good. Some of it can also be used on the early CH-47 A or the British HC-1 Chinook. I wonder if Italeri will be doing sets for those kits specifically?

The kit comes in a normal Italeri box with lots of very cool pictures of the parts being used on the kit and some shots of them as they come out of the box. There are 22 resin parts including 2 pilot seats, a more detailed upper section of the aft fuselage upper interior and a cover panel for the section forward of that. The rest of the resin parts are what appear to be antennas and sensors and flare packs.

The kit also includes 2 photo etched sheets of very detailed parts. The first includes every screen for every intake on the Chinook and a part for the aft loading ramp to dress it up a little. The second is a color photo etch sheet that includes the instrument panels and circuit breaker panels and the pilots seat belts. Very nice parts and they will save a lot of painting and scratch building in the cockpit.

The instructions are OK but they just have pictures to explain the location of the parts and no written instructions which I find helpful, but I must admit that I can find and install every part using this instruction sheet.

The only part that will be difficult in my opinion will be the engine intake screens. The instructions show the kit parts and tell you to remove the solid screen sections from them and then bend the photo etch ones around to produce new screens. Firstly I would say it will be easier to bend the photo etch around the plastic screens before you cut them out. Second I would say that it would have been nice for Italeri to provide a resin part for the screen frame rather than having us cut out the screen from the plastic part as this will be a little tricky, But I guess that is why we build models to have some thing to do and a challenge every once in a while is a good thing.

This set looks a lot like an Eduard set but no mention of them is made in the instructions that I saw, but it does say that the photo etch parts were made in the Czech Republic so one could well assume that they are indeed Eduard ,which by the way would be a compliment to both as the parts are just incredible!

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