Aircraft History

The origins of the Viking date back as far as 1964, when the U.S. Navy initiated a process designed to produce a replacement aircraft (VSX) for the Grumman S-2 Tracker. Competition began in 1968, and Lockheed was awarded the contract to develop the new aircraft in 1969. Apart from being vastly superior to the S-2 in most aspects of performance, the S-3 was designed to incorporate state-of-the-art technology in such areas as sensors, data processing, communications and weaponry. Only five years after being awarded the contract, Lockheed delivered the first production Vikings to the U.S. Navy in 1974. Squadrons of 10 S-3 Vikings were carried by all U.S. fleet Aircraft Carriers from the Forrestal class onwards.

Designed primarily to protect U.S. Carrier groups from Soviet submarines, the S-3A was a highly specialised design. It had a crew of four, with two crew members tasked with handling the sensor and tactical requirements. In common with other ASW aircraft, it had an internal weapons bay, a battery of sonobuoys, and a retractable Magnetic Anomaly Detection (MAD) boom in the tail. It had the ability to loiter on station for three hours, and could descend very quickly during an attack run, being fitted with large overwing spoilers.

Between 1987 and 1994, all Vikings were upgraded to the S-3B standard. The S-3B incorporated advances in technology to vastly improve the S-3's primary ASW capability, and also reduced the crew from four to three. However, even before this upgrade work had been completed, the role of the Viking had begun to change. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the changing political World order, the Viking had to perform an increasingly diverse number of roles. Officially, the carrier Viking squadrons (now 8 aircraft each) are designated Sea Control squadrons. Sea surveillance, mine detection and electronic monitoring are just some of the roles that the Viking is now tasked with. However, the most prominent new role has been as a tanker, which arose in part because of the gradual retirement of the A-6. With it's long loiter time, the Viking is highly suitable tanker, and performed the role with distinction during Operation 'Desert Storm'.

The S-3B is being continually updated with the installation of newer systems, with the corresponding removal of other systems that are either less capable or are no longer required given the evolving set of roles that the aircraft is undertaking. Not surprisingly, the Viking is scheduled to stay in service until 2015.

The Kit

As far as I know, there are only two mainstream kits of the Viking in this scale - and I've already built the Airfix kit many moons ago. I would guess that this kit, like the Airfix offering, dates from the late 1970's, or perhaps the early 1980's. The kit reviewed here is for an S-3A with a special 1976 'Bicentennial' scheme. Because this was on special offer from Hannants, it worked out cheaper than the regular S-3 kit, instead of the other way around. I think I paid about 15 Euro for it (Aug. 2002), which I regarded as good value even before I opened the box.

The box is a normal two-piece Hasegawa box, but the cover sports a wonderful high-resolution photograph instead of the normal artwork. This is really welcome, as it's a great reference for some of the decal placements and painting details. The kit itself is on three main sprues in light grey with raised mainly detailing Items such as the spoilers and the wing joints are engraved, as one would expect. A small transparent sprue means brings the parts total to about 90, although not all are required for this subject (including the 6 Mk. 82 bombs and racks). The sprues were sealed in bags, and I think the transparency sprue had it's own bag.

The instruction leaflet is excellent, except for the fact that it's the instruction guide for the regular kit. It includes the paint and decal guides for the two regular subjects, but not the regular decal sheet. Instead, a separate page has the paint and decal guide for the subject of this kit, along with the special decal sheet. The decal sheet was a welcome surprise in that it was produced by Cartograf of Italy, who were Italeri's old decal supplier, and a current supplier of decals to a variety of European companies such as Azur. It's not that I actively dislike Hasegawa decals - I just happen to believe that the Italians produce the best quality decals. Despite lacking detailed markings and stencilling on the wings, this decal sheet turned out to be every bit as good as it looks.

For the record, the subject options in the 'regular' kit are a grey/white aircraft from VS-28, USS Forrestal (shown on the regular cover), and an aircraft from VS-38 (USS Ranger), sporting the later toned-down all-grey scheme. As I write this review, I see from Hannant's Web site that Revell are due to release a 1/72 S-3A in spring of 2003. This will almost certainly be a reboxing of this tooling, with Revell's high quality Italian decals. As with other reboxings of Hasegawa kits, the Revell product will be more expensive than the original, even in the 'home' market of Europe. I still don't understand that strategy. Apart from the decals, there is no history of Revell adding anything extra to the Hasegawa kits such as extra stores - say Harpoon missiles and/or refuelling tanks - or additional parts to add extra detail or model new versions. So it looks as if we still have to wait for an S-3B kit.

Building the Kit

One issue that I had to sort out early on was the paint codes. The painting guide in the regular instructions (which contains a lot of internal and external painting instructions relevant to the celebration scheme) is based on Gunze Sangyo and Mr. Color codes, with a few FS codes thrown in as well. Translating Gunze Sangyo colours to Humbrol equivalents was easy. The Bicentennial leaflet only mentions Mr. Color codes, some of which were not used in the regular kit. One of these was a colour called Smoke Gray which was supposed to be applied to the main cockpit windows. Perhaps this colour wasn't available when the kit was first released, which is why it's not mentioned in the original instructions. At any rate, I didn't have any appropriate paint that I could use. I can always apply the 'smoke' finish later if I come across something suitable.

There were three other Mr. Color codes - shades of yellow, red and blue. Since FS codes were supplied, I could match them to Humbrol colours. The shade of blue (for the fuel tank and engine decorative markings) was FS15050. This is too light, and so I used FS15042 (Humbrol 181), which matched the colour shown on the cover photograph as well as that used on the decal sheet. For FS11136, Humbrol 153 red (with varnish) was a perfect match for the red used on the decals for the tail decorations and other assorted markings.

The cockpit construction was conventional, although I chose not to use the pilot figures. For the main instrument panel, there is a flat panel piece and a superb instrument panel decal - I hope it's the correct layout for a 1976 S-3A! The cockpit was painted mainly gull grey (FS26231/Hu 140). Although the instructions don't say it, the panel also needs to be painted gull grey before the before the decal is applied, as the decal is transparent apart from the instruments themselves. The kit has the central panel between the two pilots, but not the side panels outboard of each pilot station. These were in the Airfix kit, and I toyed with the idea of scratch building something simple for this kit. However, I couldn't find any photographs of the actual cockpit (let alone really detailed ones), so I let it go. The seats could be positioned at one of two different angles, and the instructions were not clear on what exactly should be done. I chose the more upright position, on the basis that reclined seats were more appropriate to high-speed fighters than a subsonic sub-chaser.

Before assembling the fuselage halves, I fixed the nose wheel bay, sonobouy section and the open arrestor hook bay to one side of the fuselage. Dry fitting the opposite fuselage half confirmed that everything would fit just about perfectly. The instructions called for only 8 grams of nose ballast, which is correct as the layout of the Viking means that the basic kit wouldn't be as tail-heavy as most other aircraft with tricycle undercarriage. Unfortunately, Hasegawa opted not to open up the bomb bay - the Airfix kit included a detailed bay with four Mk. 46 torpedoes. Two options that are included are the crew entry hatch/stair on the starboard side, and a small retractable dome just beside the nose wheel bay on the port side. I left the entry hatch closed, and the dome (probably a specialised radar) deployed. The main cockpit transparency part was attached to the sprue only a single point, so that it had warped slightly (dodgy engineering, a rare thing in this kit). No matter - it just needed to be kept firmly in place as the cement sets. I left the refuelling probe off - if it is to be used, then you would need to carefully drill out a hole in the canopy.

The upper wing was supplied as a single piece, which at a stroke eliminated all problems about getting the wing angle correct. As well as the lower wing parts, the kit also includes the long flaps as separate parts. These can be attached in either the normal retracted or deployed positions. I chose the former. It would have been nice if there were separate leading edge slats as well, so that one could build a kit with both front and rear controls fully deployed. There is no option to model the kit with folded wings. On the Viking, the fold junction slants across the wing from starboard to port on both wings, an unusual design, which results in a very compact, folding arrangement. These junctions are perfectly reproduced on the kit with precise engraved detailing. The tail plane units were preset to fit at the proper angle, with just a slight looseness in the fit requiring some attention to make sure the parts stayed in the correct position as they set. The only other problem with the wings was that the joins around the main wingtip pods were a bit rough, and needed a small bit of cleaning up.

Both main and nose undercarriage bays (and doors) were reasonably detailed. The undercarriage parts were very crisply molded and quite detailed. There was no problem with the undercarriage units, but I did have a concern about the main bay doors. Each main bay has one upper door and two lower door sections. In this kit, the lower rear sections are fixed in place, as they are included in the same lower fuselage part that includes the sonobouy battery. On the Airfix kit, these were separate parts, and were supposed to be in a slightly drooped position when the undercarriage is deployed. I suspect that the Hasegawa kit is correct, in that these door sections would only open out briefly as the undercarriage is being extended or retracted, and would otherwise stay closed, flush with the fuselage. This is a common design feature on many aircraft, designed to reduce drag during take-off and landing. For the other main door sections, the only question was what angle to set them at. Once that was done, it was another case of putting the kit in a vertical position and leaving things to set hard overnight.

© Kevin Ronayne 2005

Before I added the engines, I decided to paint the fuselage first and add the decals. As the engine pods would be very close to the fuselage, I feared that they might obstruct efforts to correctly position the celebration stripes that ran for almost the full length of the aircraft. Painting was easy in that I just had to use Hu 22 gloss white, but it took some time to carefully apply two coats of this quite slow-drying paint by hand.

The decals were of exceptional quality. Apart from being very thin and almost completely devoid of carrier film, they were flawless in terms of colour reproduction and separation. Each main fuselage stripe decoration was split into two sections. On the port side, the stripes had to run over a small aperture near the rear of the aircraft. Despite the decal being specifically designed to fit over this, it was still a very awkward fit. I ended up cutting away small parts of the decal, and later hand-painted the offending area. Because the paints I used were perfect matches for the decal colours, it still looked like a seamless decal. I nearly messed up the forward stripes decal for the starboard side, through a combination of not keep a close eye on the decal as it soaked (some decals came off the backing paper in less than 10 seconds), and sheer clumsiness. I eventually got it straightened out and fitted perfectly - so good was the adhesion of the decals, I never once thought I might need to use a decal-setting solution. For the main fin/rudder stars and stripes decoration ('Don't Tread on Me'), there was a separate decal for each side. The only problem was with the top of the rudder. It is next to impossible to produce a decal that will neatly cover something that is curved in 3-D, such as the forward tip of the tail. Again, I just used paint to touch things up.

Now I could finally get to the engines and drop-tanks, although not without contemplating the fact that the Viking would be more aesthetically pleasing if it could somehow fly without engines! Each engine/pylon unit comprised seven parts, and presented no problems during assembly. The only matter that required some attention was that the triangular 'Jet Intake/Danger' markings were reproduced as decals with a clear central section, instead of being printed in white. Instead of painting the units completely in dark gloss blue, I had to mark off and paint the appropriate areas in white before applying the decals. The box photograph clearly shows the markings extending over the lip of the intake, and the decals were specifically designed to reproduce this. My only problem with the fuel tanks again came with the decals used to represent the stars on the front and rear of the tanks. Although the decals were shaped to make them easy to apply to the curved surfaces, the reality was that it took some time to get it right. I think that I have a mental block about applying decals over complex curved surfaces!

The rest of the kit was just about tidying up loose ends, as it were. The arrestor hook was helpfully marked with raised panel lines to indicate the white and black bands - would that everyone would do this. A couple of fin antennae were pre-molded on the fuselage, but ten other antennae had to be added to the fuselage and wings. The MAD boom was not cemented in place - once inserted in the fully retracted position, it was more or less stuck there. I couldn't find any direct Humbrol match for the cream colour required for the tip of the boom, but any suitable cream colour might do. The nose radome was, of course, painted Radome Tan (FS33613/Hu 148). Apart from antennae and wingtip markings, the rest of the painting was just more gloss white - I must have used up almost an entire tin of paint on this kit.

Accuracy

Apart from the kit being very close to the quoted dimensions, the really impressive features were the level and accuracy of the panel detailing, and the accurate reproduction of the subtle contouring of the main wing. As with many aircraft, the shape of the Viking's undercarriage changes dramatically during take-off and landing. The kit has the undercarriage as it would be when the plane is safely on the ground (or the deck!), which is how it should be.

© Kevin Ronayne 2005

Hasegawa kit in enthusiastic review shocker!

The last Hasegawa kit I built was the Revell-boxed Mosquito B.IV, which had some disturbing engineering faults and other problems. Happily, this kit is back at the level of quality one expects from Hasegawa, even if it is quite old in relative terms. Overall engineering, fit, detail, and accuracy were excellent, and the kit was a joy to build.

References

A fine source of online information on the Viking is the huge Global Security site, which has (or will have in the future) detailed information on just about every piece of hardware used by the U.S. Military. For the Viking, there is range of HTML pages (mainly about the S-3B) and over 50 pictures, all accessible via this address. Note that complete HTML pages cannot be saved in the usual fashion in Internet Explorer, as this produces an error. However, using the 'Web Archive/Single file' option does the trick, saving the page as an .MHT file complete with embedded graphics.