The Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress was the United States Army Air Force’s primary heavy bomber at the beginning of the US’s entry in World War II and served throughout the entirety of the war.  Replaced by the B-24 Liberator after sporadic operations in the first days of hostilities in the Pacific, the aircraft was deployed to Europe in mid-1942 to embark on a three-year campaign of daylight bombing from bases in England and Italy.

            The B-17F model carried the load during the first years of combat, with an alarming casualty rate that prompted modifications to the aircraft to improve defensive capabilities.  German fighter tactics emphasized head-on attacks against the bomber formations to exploit the weaker defensive fire provided by a manually-operated single machine gun mounted in the nose canopy.  With the introduction of the B-17G, this weakness was addressed by the addition of a chin-mounted powered turret with two machine guns, first tested operationally in the YB-40 escort gunship.  Later production variants of the G model saw staggered waist gun positions to give the two gunners more room to maneuver, and a newly-designed “Cheyenne” tail turret configuration provided the gunner greater visibility and an extended field of fire.

            Thousands of B-17s served with the 8th and 15th Air Forces, going out on missions week after week until the final surrender of Germany in May 1945.  Historians continue to debate the impact of strategic bombing and whether it made a significant difference in the timing of the outcome of the war.  That topic is beyond the scope of this model kit review, but nothing can diminish the bravery of the men who flew those missions in sub-zero temperatures, subjected to the threat of an instant death from a well-placed flak burst, or being riddled with machine gun and cannon fire from enemy fighters, or becoming a casualty due to navigation errors, dangerous formation flying, training accidents, or equipment failure.  All of it contributed to the well-deserved legendary status of this amazing Boeing airplane.

            The Revell 1/72 scale B-17G represents an early G model, with unstaggered waist gun positions.  The kit provides alternative nose canopy pieces, framed and unframed waist gun and radio room windows, open or closed cowling flaps, and both the regular and the later Cheyenne tail gun configurations.  Almost all of the B-17Gs with unstaggered waist gun positions (produced by Boeing, Douglas, and Lockheed Vega) were delivered in Olive Drab over Neutral Gray camouflage paint.  317 parts make up the kit with two decal options provided, both with the 91st (of course) Bomb Group: Little Miss Mischief, which is a Franken-airplane constructed from two damaged B-17s with the front half and wings in natural metal and the rear fuselage in Olive Drab, and the old standard Nine O Nine.  Decals are printed by Cartograf and are of excellent quality.

            The detail provided for the interior is quite impressive, particularly in this scale.  The Wright R-1820 engines are very nicely done, although there are no wiring harnesses.  The wheel wells have decent representations of the internal structure – something no other B-17 in this scale had provided until this kit was introduced.  The nose, cockpit, radio room, bomb bay, waist and tail gun positions are all sufficiently outfitted.  There is a decal provided for the instrument panel.  The one curiously missing item is the lack of any of the bright yellow breathing oxygen tanks located behind the pilot seats and in the rear fuselage.

            The flaps can be posed open, something almost never seen on B-17s while parked on the ground, and the bomb bay doors can be installed closed or open if one cuts the piece in two.

            Revell continues to print their instructions on newspaper-quality stock in black ink, a minor irritant, and the drawings are small.  The model comes in the annoying side-opening box that Revell Germany continues to use, so be prepared to transfer the contents of the model to something more robust while working on it.

There have been many model kits released of this iconic aircraft over the years in this scale from Revell, Airfix, Hasegawa, FROG, Matchbox, and Academy, but the promise of a new-tool kit with modeler-preferred recessed panel lines and a complete interior raised created great expectations in the modeling community with the release of this Revell kit in 2010.  That excitement turned somewhat sour when the model was inspected by B-17 aficionados.  Numerous issues were identified, some of which I will describe here.  Note this is not a complete list of all the items, but the ones that I considered while building my model:        

·      Accuracy of outline has been matched to reliable drawings and things unfortunately deviate from the plans in that the wing airfoil is too thick, and the nose tapers too severely.  Both of these issues are nearly impossible to fix without major surgery of the kit parts, something I wasn’t willing to tackle.  Enterprising B-17 fans have been known to graft on fuselage parts from the older Hasegawa and Academy kits as their particular subject warrants.

·      The panel lines molded into the nose pieces are overly deep and questionably arranged into an almost brick-like pattern that doesn’t match the actual aircraft’s rivet patterns.  The remaining fuselage and wing parts have finely recessed panel lines and while not true to the aircraft’s overlapping aluminum sheets with raised rivets, they are what modelers tend to prefer in modern kits.  I elected to fill the panel lines in the nose and lightly draw in more representative lines with a pencil after the model was painted.

·      The top turret sits way too high.  I shaved off the flange on the outside of the turret structure and lopped off the locating pin at the bottom, lowering it a good 2 mm for a much more realistic look.

·      The horseshoe-shaped ILS antenna on the nose is ridiculously too large for the scale.  I fashioned a new one with a bent piece of wire for the wings and a short piece of sheet styrene for the post.  Of course, it snapped off and disappeared sometime between when I finished the model and when it was photographed for this review.  I’ll need to fix that by making another one.

·      The kit decal instructions for Nine O Nine have the aircraft codes positioned on the starboard side as OR-R (reading from left to right), but I found a photo of the aircraft that shows them to be R-OR.  I didn’t catch this until after my model was painted and decaled, so it was too late to fix without stripping the decals off and applying replacements.

·      The nose canopy piece is thick as a Coke bottle bottom.  The only alternative for this is to source one of those Falcon/Squadron vacuum-formed replacements if you can find one.  I couldn’t, so I just did my best trying to hide the thickness by painting the edges with Olive Drab and Neutral Gray paint.

·      The glazing for the tail gunner position mounts about 1.5 mm too far aft.  If one draws a line straight down from the trailing edge of the rudder, it should intersect the canopy framing as it angles downward.  This is an easy fix to enable by cutting a deeper recess in the vertical stabilizer, which unfortunately I did not do on my model as I only just learned of it while doing research for this build article.  There’s always a next time.

            To sum up, we have a pretty seriously compromised B-17 kit.  The detail is very good, the shape is problematic, and there are some issues like the thick nose canopy, too-tall top turret mount, and an oversized ILS antenna that have to be addressed.  It was quite a disappointment for all of those B-17 fans looking for the one defining model kit of the Flying Fortress that our hobby deserves.  I’ve built the original 1962 Revell and the 1976 Hasegawa kits.  Both suffer from toy-like features with raised panel lines, golf-ball sized rivets (Revell), and non-existent interior detail.  Academy’s series of kits in 1/72 scale have sparse interiors and a pronounced exaggeration of dihedral for the main wings.  I wanted to see what this new-tool Revell was like, even with its shortcomings, as the B-17 is my all-time favorite airplane.  So, I went ahead and built it.

            First off, I had to decide which B-17G I wanted to depict.  This is important because of the varied configurations of turrets, gun arrangements, and fuselage window locations.   Non-staggered waist guns means a camouflaged aircraft.  Cheyenne tail turrets were sometimes fitted to operational aircraft in the field, but they became the production standard at the factory later in the G model run, almost always with an unpainted aluminum finish.  The kit markings for Little Miss Mischief did not interest me, and I was generally disinclined to do Nine O Nine as it garnered a lot of attention when applied to the Collings Foundation warbird that tragically crashed in 2019.  But finding aftermarket decals that can definitively apply to an early model B-17G with unstaggered waist guns and the original tail turret configuration was surprisingly hard – and I looked extensively -- so I half-heartedly settled on Nine O Nine.  The good news is that Nine O Nine is fairly well documented and the Revell kit parts regarding the cheek gun emplacements, astrodome, and nose window arrangement can be confirmed in period photographs.

            I discarded the four 500 lb. bombs as I detest painting those yellow stripes on the noses, even more aggravating in 1/72 scale.  The interior of mid-production B-17s was mostly unpainted, including the cowls and wheel wells.  The fabric sound-deadening applied to the forward crew compartment walls on earlier B-17s was dispensed with.  I used Alclad II Lacquer Aluminum on the insides of both fuselage halves and applied a dark gray wash to bring out the detail.  Some accents like the seats, instrument panel coaming, and control columns were painted with Vallejo Model Air USAF Green FS34092, which is my reasonable substitute for Bronze Green.  As I wrote in previous build articles of B-17s, there was no use of Interior Green ANA 611 (FS34151) paint in any Flying Fortress, ever.  Warbirds are painted this color to prevent corrosion, but it isn’t historically accurate.  Kit instructions are also notoriously wrong in calling out for Interior Green to be used everywhere, including the interior of the cowlings and wheel wells.  

            The plywood floors in the radio room and nose section were painted with a light tan and dry-brushed with brown to simulate wood grain.  Consoles, the instrument panel, and radio equipment were painted with flat black.  I soaked some tissue paper cut to the proper size with white glue and painted it yellow for the seat cushions.  Thin strips of paper were painted medium gray and glued over the cushions to simulate the lap belts for the pilot and co-pilot.  There were rubber mats installed on the floor behind the pilot seats and in the rear fuselage for the waist gunners to traverse, which I painted a very dark gray.

            The bomb bay was assembled first, with the interior assemblies for the rear fuselage, radio room, cockpit, and nose sections added until the entire interior was built up.  This was inserted between the two fuselage halves, which I glued together with CA glue to avoid the appearance of ghost seams later.

            The nose section involves adding inserts for the windows and cheek gun emplacements, and then the astrodome on top.  These pieces were glued on and the seams filled.  There are some pretty aggressive attachment tabs present on the clear parts that I sanded off.  The overly heavy panel lines from the windscreen forward were filled with Mr. Surfacer 500 and sanded smooth.  The fairing behind the chin turret went on next.

            At the rear of the fuselage, the tail gunner’s interior parts are inserted between two halves and then attached to the back of the airplane.  I filled the resulting seams and then turned my attention to blending in the cockpit canopy, radio room glazing, and tail gunner windows to the surrounding fuselage.  These seams were carefully filled and sanded smooth.

            The wings were next, as I glued in the structural pieces and oil tanks in the wheel wells, as well as the intake trunking for each of the carburetor air intakes on the leading edges of the wings.  The engines were painted with Alaclad Jet Exhaust and a dark gray wash applied to bring out the raised details.  The crankcases were painted with Vallejo Model Air Gunship Gray, then a coat of Future Floor polish gave a glossy finish to them.  The wings and horizontal stabilizers were attached to the fuselage and those seams filled with thick CA glue followed by Mr. Surfacer 500.

            B-17s only had their flaps extended in the open position for takeoff and landing, but the kit provides the modeler the option to pose them this way if so desired.  The ailerons, elevators, and rudders were all glued in the neutral position, as seen on parked aircraft.  The engines went on each nacelle and the cowlings placed over them, with the pieces for the open cowl flaps used, again a detail seen on Flying Forts on the ground.

            I restored the panel lines lost in the seam filling process with a scriber, washed the model to remove sanding dust and fingerprints, and masked all the of the clear parts in preparation for paint.

As written previously, Nine O Nine was a well-photographed aircraft, several in color.  It sported 140 mission markings, all flown without loss of crew.  It was a well-worn airplane, with a faded Olive Drab over Neutral Gray camouflage pattern, no rubber de-icer boots on the wings and vertical stabilizer (but still on the two horizontal ones) and framed enclosed waist gun windows.  The bulged cheek gun emplacements had been installed sometime during its long operational period, so fresher Olive Drab paint was applied there.  Engines 2 and 4 had unpainted cowl flaps.  At the time, the 91st Bomb Group aircraft sported red wingtips, horizontal stabilizers (but not the elevators), and the tallest portion of the vertical stabilizer but not the rudder.

I started by priming the entire model with Vallejo Grey Surface Primer.  This helps greatly with adhesion for the somewhat fragile Vallejo Model Air paints used for the camouflage colors.  The underside got a custom mix of Neutral Gray, darkened with 20% black.  The very faded Olive Drab on the topside was lightened with 30% white and 10% tan.  The control surfaces, covered with doped fabric, faded even more so I masked them off and painted them with Olive Drab lightened with 60% white.

The red accents were painted with my dwindling supply of Testors Acryl Insignia Red, and the de-icer boots and two of the cowling flaps were painted with Alclad Aluminum.  You’ll need to measure the length and width of the de-icer boots as Revell does not emboss this on the kit parts as almost every other B-17 model does.   The propellers had Aluminum hubs, flat black blades, and yellow tips (4 scale inches only boys!).  The backsides of the blades were weathered with a translucent spray of Aluminum, with a silver color pencil used to depict paint chipping on the leading edges.

The turbosuperchargers and related ducting were painted with Alclad Jet Exhaust and dry-brushed with Rust.  A dark wash was applied to the recessed areas.

A coat of Future Floor Polish prepared the model for decals.  I used the kit decals, which behaved perfectly, applied with a little puddle of Future under each marking to insure a secure bond.  As written above, the starboard side aircraft code letters should read R-OR, which I didn’t know at the time.  Also note that Nine O Nine did not have black wing-walk striping -- that was a feature of the modern warbird.  I learned later that the white Triangle-A marking on the top of the starboard wing should not have a black surround, again an incorrect feature of the warbird.

Weathering consisted of a dark wash in all the panel lines and wheel wells, dark gray pastel chalk for the exhaust staining coming out of the turbosupercharger ports underneath each nacelle, and a thin line of oil staining coming from the one o’clock position (when viewed from the front) starting behind the cowl flaps.   As mentioned in my other B-17 kit reviews, this stain pattern travels back across the top of the wings and fans out wider before it goes between the four hot air vents.  I added the pencil-drawn panel lines on the nose using a piece of Dymo label tape (anyone remember that?) as a guide.  

Paint wear on both wing roots was added with multiple stabs of a silver color pencil and slowly built up until it matched what I see in period photographs of B-17s.  More chalk pastels were used to add grime on random areas of the wings and nacelles.   A coat of Testors Acryl Clear Flat sealed in the weathering.  The tires were painted with Vallejo Model Air Tire Black with a thin spray of light tan to reflect operations on an often times muddy airfield.

The kit provides no representation of the wingtip position lights, so I added a dab of clear blue (starboard) and clear red (port) paint on the ends of the wings.  There are two signaling lights below the tail guns, one red and one white.

The main landing gear struts were glued in and the wheels attached.  The tail wheel was next, but this is a little tricky and my first attempt had the tire mounted too deep into the well.  I broke this off and re-positioned the strut, checking photos for proper depth.  The chin turret went on and rotated 90 degrees to starboard, as frequently seen on B-17Gs while parked.  On the actual aircraft, the guns would be raised upwards, but Revell only allows the guns to be pointed straight ahead.  If I had thought about it beforehand, I would have filled the holes for the barrels in the turret and drilled new ones higher up.  I carefully inserted the cheek guns in their mounting holes using tweezers – a nerve-wracking operation.  I usually blend in the Perspex nose canopy with the surrounding fuselage on my bomber models, but I wanted to paint the edge of the extremely thick clear piece in hopes of tricking the viewer into not focusing on that detail.  I brushed Olive Drab and Neutral Gray in their respective positions and carefully glued the piece on with just a few tiny drops of CA glue.  I think it came out pretty well, the best I could manage with what the kit provided.

The top turret without the flange around the circumference was dropped down into its hole.  The waist gun windows were added after installing the machine guns, and the two tail machine guns glued into the holes in the canvas tail gun cover.  I had trouble getting the ball turret to slip into its cradle, so it was glued in the aft-facing position.  The props went onto their shafts.  The bomb bay doors were carefully glued onto the retraction mechanisms.  The antenna mast, ADF football, and scratch-built ILS antenna on the front of the nose were glued on, leaving only one more step, which was to add two aerial wires emanating from the front of the tail fin to either side of a spot on the side of the radio room.  I used nylon invisible thread for this and painted them dark gray. 

            A swing and a miss for Revell.  This release did not live up to its expectations of being the definitive 1/72 scale B-17 model kit.  It has a lot going for it with a very detailed interior, bomb bay, wheel wells, and excellent engines, which doesn’t really offset the dimensional issues described above.  Does it look like a B-17?  Of course, it does.  Will anyone but the most educated B-17 aficionados notice the issues?  Again, of course not.  Would I recommend it?  I would give a very qualified yes as it is functionally and tooling-wise a better model kit than the much older Revell, Airfix, FROG, Hasegawa, and Academy kits.  Is there a better option for someone wanting to build just one B-17 in this scale, regardless of model configuration?  For that, I can say that the new-tool Airfix late B-17G released in 2022 is head and shoulders better than this kit.  But it almost has to be painted with a natural metal finish (there were a few exceptions) and that scares some people.  So, for an Olive Drab over Neutral Gray Flying Fortress, this Revell kit is the reluctant recommendation.  But, just barely.

·      Freeman, Roger: The Mighty Eighth in Colour

Lee Kolosna

4 October 2025

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