Revell-Monogram 1/48 A-4E/F Skyhawk

Chances are, if you’re my age (sixt-cough) and have been building aircraft long enough, you’ve either seen or built one or more Monogram 1/48 A-4 Skyhawks. Quite a few of them have graced the screens of Modeling Madness in the past three decades.

Even as the molds aged over the years, Monogram’s Skyhawk in its attack, adversary, OA-4M and hi-tech issues has always been easy to build, well detailed for its late 1970s vintage and well-endowed with underwing stores. Mold wear required more detail work on some seams and joints, but nothing that some basic modeling skill couldn’t handle.

I built this A-4E from what was probably the last Revell US repop before the company went under and Revell Germany stepped in as its successor. You get the Mk 82’s AGM-45 Shrikes and drop tanks that came with just about every issue of the kit over four decades.

The decal sheet includes markings for VA-46 Clansmen on Yankee Station in 1967 and Blue Angels 1-4. I’m not sure about the Blues’ yellow marking opacity, but the decals conform well using the MicroScale decal setting/solvent system.

Read MM’s kit review index for plenty of detail on the kit, but rest assured that it’s fun for old timers and newcomers alike.

John McCain and the summer of 1967

I started this project in 2016 or 17 as a kind of stretching exercise. As a Navy brat, I heard several tales of the third McCain to see naval service, and one of the kit decal options turned out to be his aircraft with VA-46 on the Forrestal in July 1967.

The project sounded like an interesting project, so I headed to the Naval Historical Center website to get some background. That turned into a month of wandering the web for even more details after reading the final fire investigation report and what really happened on the morning of July 29, 1967 on Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Contrary to all the politically-motivated comments on the web, McCain had nothing to do with the Forrestal fire except being in the wrong place that morning off the coast of North Vietnam. A chain of events that started a few days earlier. Some very unsafe and unstable WW II 1,000 bombs were loaded onto the Forrestal because of a fleet-wide bomb shortage and then SecDef Robert McNamara’s pressure on Navy and Air Force theater commanders to increase bombing sortie rates.

That pressure came to a head on July 29, when a rack safety pin loosened in the deck wind on an F-4B Phantom loaded for the morning’s launch. As the Phantom's engines started, an electrical surge armed and fired a Zuni pod into a Skyhawk parked feet from McCain's plane. The resulting fuel spill and fire spread to other aircraft and cooked off one of the bombs loaded on the first A-4.

That explosion killed several of the ship's firefighters and deck crew and at least one pilot and other pilots tried to taxi away from the fire or, in McCain's case, escape their parked jets.

One legacy from that day: the fire fighting school at Naval Base Norfolk is named for the Forrestal’s lead damage control chief petty officer. He died as he led a damage control party toward the opening stages of the deck blaze when another bomb detonated

When I started this project, the Naval Historical Center still had several photos and documents relating to the fire and the after-incident investigation. McCain's 416 shows prominently in some of the photos, and useful information on 416's configuration showed in the incident diagram and report.

Steve Ginter's book on A-4E/Fs had a photo of a VA-46 A-4E that confirmed the overall accuracy of the kit decal sheet including the size of the fin tartan bands.

The model isn't far from stock, with just a few detail bits added to the cockpit and a frame liner, rear view mirrors and a canopy support strut added. Ginter's book diagrams and photos showed that a few of the kit’s ice cream cone ECM antennae should be left off this particular model.

The wings and fuselage were rescribed (all sorts of fun when doing the upper wing inspection panels) I made a template from .020 styrene sheer with cutouts for the bands of upper wing vortex generators to give a positive template locator. I then placed three Post-It notes on the wing and rubbed the raised oval inspection ports with pencil, using that pattern to place and cut out corresponding holes in the template.

That template came in handy when I rescribed the wings for the other four A-4s in my stash. I also rescribed wing and fuselage panel lines across the kit and made a set of templates with the Post-It trick to scribe the nose avionic hatches.

After wading through the NHC documents and a couple of video clips of Forrestal deck activity that day, I found the loadout for 416: a centerline droptank and two 1,000-pound bombs with what appeared to be postwar swept-fin tailcone kits. I reworked the kit wing racks with recesses for the rack mechanism and sway braces. The bombs came from a Monogram F-8E Crusader kit, with scratchbuilt fuses and arming wires.

Photos suggested that the centerline tank had a rounded cone instead of the finned cone installation. I cut off the kit tank's rear cone, carved and sanded a master for a replacement cone, and cast a few in Alumilite resin before installing a replacement.

I had a leftover Monogram A-4 fuselage from a shelf-of-doom A-4C conversion, so I cut a section of the fuselage halves where the intake bell should be. Capping off each end of the section with .040 sheet styrene, I filled the cavity with Alumilite to form a block to carve a master for the intake trunk. Again, for the future A-4 projects in my stash, I cast four more. It was a drop fit in the kit fuselage and made it easier to shim out the fuselage to make a tighter fuselage/upper wing joint seam.

I decided not to press my luck with replacing the moving fin fairings where the stabilizers were trimmed. The lower fuselage aft of the wing joint always needed work, so some plastic stock and Milliput helped even out that area.

I stuck with the kit landing gear and wheels. Given the age of the kit at that time, some careful scraping and file work took care of mold seams on the gear legs.

I used Tamiya fine white primer both as primer and for the white areas on the fuselage. Testors Model Master Light Gull Gray and other Model Master and square-bottle enamels covered the rest. A couple of coats of Future finished the surface prep for decaling.

Rack and landing gear safety pins were made from plastic discs and red-painted paper and installed accordingly. I brought out an O brush and Vallejo red to paint the landing gear door edges.

The kit decals match well with photos of VA-46 A-4E's shot just before the squadron's 1967 cruise. While the kit's fin tartan stripes appear short, they match photos and, according to the Ginter photo, there does not appear to be a Corugard metallic strip on the fin leading edge.

The A-4C-style nose national insignia placement is correct for VA-46’s A-4Es on the 1967 Forrestal deployment. I sliced the starboard nose insignia and placed the decal parts such that they aligned for the proper height. After they were set and dried, I use the 0 brush, insignia blue and white to bridge the gap.

The upper wing national insignia and aircraft number needed the usual slicing and extra decal solvent because of the vortex generators, but they conformed and needed just some touchup paint to be right again.

Testors Dullcote sealed the finish, and I used an HB pencil to trace the panel lines.

If you run across a Monogram A-4 in its various guises, grab one. It may not be a Hasegawa or Hobby Boss kit in fit or some detail, but it builds well and rewards a little research and TLC with a sharp looking model. It’s good for the intermediate modeler with a few kits under their belt or a good start for more advanced detailing projects.

Douglas USN A-4E/F Skyhawk, Steve Ginter, ISBN-10: 0942612515

Naval Historical Center – Forrestal fire: https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/ships/aircraft-carriers/forrestal.html

Mike Still

17 September 2024

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