It was great back in the 'olden days' (pre 1986) when USN planes had large, colorful tail markings. However, fear that the Libyans would take revenge against the US for shooting down two of its planes meant that the P-3s would become 'anonymous'. Naturally, nothing happened. That lasted about 5 years and then the markings slowly returned, but smaller in size and in shades of grey.

This sheet has five different aircraft on it. All of the insignia and common markings will have to come from the kit or other sources as they are not included. In fact, the instructions are actually quite poor. You see, Microscale was run by two brothers. They decided to split up with one taking the aircraft decals and one returning to trains. The one who did the aircraft named his company Superscale. It wasn't cool to have 'Microscale' printed on the instructions so he photocopied them on a single side of a sheet. Unfortunately, with a lot of sheets, there was info on the back side that never got copied, or was copied so small and so poorly that the information was useless. This is one of those sheets.

Since they are all basically the same except for the unit markings on the tail, I'll just run down what is on the sheet. By the way, the only kit is the now rather old but still quite good Hasegawa version.

First unit is the lone P-3A from the Reserves, VP64 with the LU tail code.

Next are all P-3Cs. SG - VP-50, RD - VP-47, LP - VP-49 and LN - VP-45.

It is a shame these have never been reissued as P-3 sheets can be quite difficult to find.

Review copy courtesy of me.

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