Qmen J-20 Mighty Dragon

\The Chengdu J-20 (Chinese: 歼-20; pinyin: Jiān-Èrlíng), also known as Mighty Dragon (Chinese: 威龙; pinyin: Wēilóng), is a single-seat, twinjet, all-weather, stealth, fifth-generation fighter aircraft developed by China's Chengdu Aerospace Corporation for the People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF). The J-20 is designed as an air superiority fighter with precision strike capability; it descends from the J-XX program of the 1990s. It has been surmised that a fair amount of the technology in the J-20 is a result of espionage from the F-35 program.

35 or so years ago, Hasegawa came out with an entire line of whimsical kits that were known as Egg Planes. The line was fairly extensive and they were fun to build. However, that seemed to be the end of it. The kits were steady sellers, but not to the extent that engendered more new offerings. Move forward to about 10 years ago and we see a slow renewal of interest with some new items from Hasegawa. This seemed to take off fairly well and other model companies started producing similar lines of models, but expanding into ships and tanks in addition to aircraft.

Now we have the first two kits from a company called Qmen. Apparently, Qmen is part of the Kitty Hawk/Panda group. This is their first offering and is something to be expected from a company based in China as the Chinese are very proud of the J-20.

The kit itself is molded in red plastic and has a minimal number of parts. There is no stand provided, so you have some very heft landing gear, which has separate wheels to make painting easy. No nose weight is indicated, but it may be smart to add a little anyway. Decals are provided for instruments.

The kit comes with a pilot figure that can be built to either fit into the cockpit or stand next to the completed model. From the look of it, the pilot is a Panda. The seated pilot is placed under a large, one-piece canopy.

Instructions are well done though brief as you'd expect from a simple kit. Paint information is provided using Gunze paints. You have two options with this one. One is a fairly standard scheme of greys with low visibility markings. The other is a plane that was specially painted to celebrate 70 years of the PRC. This one is overall red, which undoubtedly why the kit is red. Decals look to be very nice and should provide no issues on application.

It is nice to see these sorts of kits produced, I've built a few of the Hasegawa versions over the years and friends have built other company's tanks and ships. All have turned out well and are a neat break from the norm. These should appeal to the younger builders as well and would be perfect for them.

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