Special Hobby 1/72 Mirage F.1B/BE

The Dassault Mirage F1 is a French fighter and attack aircraft designed and manufactured by Dassault Aviation. It was developed as a successor to the Mirage III family.

During the 1960s, Dassault commenced development of what would become the Mirage F1 as a private venture, alongside the larger Mirage F2. Work on the F1 eventually took precedence over the costlier F2, which was cancelled during the late 1960s. The French Air Force (Armée de l'Air) took interest in the fledgling fighter to meet its requirement for an all-weather interceptor aircraft. Accordingly, initial production units were equipped with the Thomson-CSF Cyrano IV monopulse radar. During the latter half of 1974, the Mirage F1 entered service in the French Air Force. Shortly thereafter, the type was deployed as the main interceptor of the French Air Force, a capacity which it continued to serve in until the arrival of the Mirage 2000. It later transitioned to an aerial reconnaissance role. In July 2014, the last French Mirage F1s were retired from service.

In line with other modern toolings from the CMK group, the external detailing is very well done. This kit is basically the single seat version with additional parts to make the two seater. It means you'll have a lot of parts on the sprues that are not used. The kit also comes with some small resin sprues for the wingtip missile rails (which I guess are different than those of the single seater) and a pair of chaff/flare dispensers to attach to the ventral fins.

You are provided two cockpit tubs and the instrument panels used decals, which is fairly standard in this scale. One then builds up the exhaust and installs that and the interior bits before closing the fuselage halves. The kit has a lot of very small antennas they show being attached early. I'd wait until just before painting to deal with those. Intakes are shallow, but not an issue as you can see very little when you look into them. You also have to cut away the refueling probe from an unused part and install it on this one.

Next up are the flying surfaces. You do have to do some surgery on the wing tips for a couple of the markings options. Note that these trainers rarely carried wing pylons so the holes for them will need to be filled. Construction moves on to the landing gear which are properly complex as they are on the real deal. Seats are then built up and installed. Next the clear bits are attached. These are designed to be posed open and SH even includes the blast shield behind the front cockpit. A centerline tank and pylon are shown for one option, with that option also getting the resin wingtip missile rails.

Instructions are well done and in color. Three markings options are provided. Two are French with the retirement scheme for ER 2/33 shown on the box art. The other is a 50th anniversary of EC 3/30 and in addition to the standard French scheme of blue-grey uppers and silver underside, this one has yellow-orange undersides to the wings. The third is a Spanish version that visited the 1988 Tiger Meet in Italy. This one is in the four color tactical camo of tan, brown, and green over pale grey. The fairly large decal sheet is well done and I expect the Cartograf markings to work well.

There are a number of Mirage F.1 kits that have been produced in this scale from Airfix, Heller, Hasegawa, and ESCI. Special Hobby released both this kit and their single seat version in 2016 and has done more boxings in the time since then. The single seat kit has since been reboxed by Revell and Heller if Scalemates is correct.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dassault_Mirage_F1

January 2025 

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