I am sure that Hasegawa was thrilled to learn that the P-8 was being developed. After all, they have had a 737-800 kit on the market for quite some time and now they get a whole new line of kits for just the cost of a single new sprue!

So it turned out to be. The 737-800 is one of their relatively newer line of kits. It includes a fuselage bare of windows, a hefty nose weight, the standard Hasegawa 1/200 display stand, a set of 'wheels up' bits that simply plug into place and the older style engines. By this I mean that the engines are not the single mold that the newest kits offer. The newest kits also have horizontally split fuselages and this one is the 'standard' vertical split.

OK, so what is new? Well, that is the K sprue. You see, the P-8 has a ton of lumps and bumps sticking out of the fuselage in all sorts of places. Frankly, I do not recall any but the SPOD P-3s sporting protuberances such as what the P-8 carries. For those fearing a need to break out a tape measure to figure out where all these pieces go, fear not. Hasegawa has modified the fuselage mold to include little areas where the holes are flashed over so all you have to do is follow instructions and open up what is needed. Of course, you'll also have to fill in some unnecessary side doors, cargo bay doors and panel lines, but you are shown just what is needed. An interesting feature of the P-8 compared to airliners is that the winglets are actually somewhat downturned. Looks odd, but there it is.

Instructions are standard Hasegawa stuff with Gunze paint references but basically you are looking at overal FS 16440, light gull grey, a pretty standard color that any USN modeler will have aplenty. Leading edges of flight surfaces and engines are silver. Markings are for two planes from VP-5. The difference is in the nose number and in the tail markings. Unfortunately, like most VP tail markngs, they are in black and greys, but better than nothing. If one recalls, it was following the 1986 Libyan conflict where all the really big markings were removed for fear of retaliation (something that, as usual, never happened).  Somewhere I have a photo of VP-46 removing the markings back then.