Italeri 1/72 Lockheed F-22 Raptor

ITALERI 1:48 F-22 RAPTOR

Reviewer: Trevor Boxall (rec.models.scale)
Kit Review submitted: 2 October 2002

Aircraft History:

The F-22 Raptor spawned from the pre-production YF-22 Lightning II prototype which was both developed and the winner (in a 'play off' against the Northrop YF-23) to replace the F-15 Eagle fleet, and launch the USAF into the 21st century. The YF-22 was built and developed by a range of companies including Lockheed, Boeing and General Dynamics. In 1991 the F-22 was selected as the production aircraft.

Several stealth design and features were incorporated including internal weapons bays and the overall profile of the aircraft. The F-22 differed a little to its prototype YF-22 and partly due to this the Pentagon decided that another name (other than the Lightning II) be used for the production aircraft. From this emerged "Raptor" and the aircraft was supposed to enter service in 1994, but due to a number of development and teething glitches, plus the ever changing face of Companies (Lockheed buying General Dynamics; Boeing incorporating McDonell Douglas etc) plus funding cuts, the type is only now in the position to enter service with the USAF.

The Kit:

Italeri were the first company to release a production F-22 in quarter scale and overall have done pretty well. Parts are molded in a light grey colour and there are plenty of them in the box to use. Surface detail is very good and well defined, with etched control surfaces. Quality of the mouldings is very good with no flash on any parts. The clear canopy in particular is very nice.

Instructions:

Italeri at their usual standard with a foldout booklet type, providing clear and easy to follow construction steps, painting guides from the Testors Modelmaster range, sprue diagram and multi- view profiles for decal placement and colour markings.

Construction:

The cockpit is rather bare with Italeri only providing the essentials rather than the detail. There is a tub into which goes the four-part ejection seat, side stick control column and instrument panel. A decal is provided to represent the instrumentation on the panel. Everything fits quite well, and once the interior was painted in grey and the cockpit installed into the upper nose half, it was time to move onto the fuselage halves placement.

Rear engines, internal bay structures and intake bulkheads are trapped within the fuselage halves and much of the interior parts are painted in a ghost grey as outlined in the instructions. Before I moved onto the wings I decided to affix the intakes to the fuselage body, which turned out to be quite problematic. One edge of the intake wall was slightly warped and needed to be later affixed with super glue and held in place to dry so it blended into the fuselage contours. The fit is not very good for the whole intake assembly and at one stage I thought that Italeri were either missing a part or had got the two intakes back to front. Thankfully that was not the case and it is a case of perseverance will succeed. Afterwards, a tiny bit of filler and sanding was needed to blend in the whole intake section nicely.

Next was the wings and this proved to be an area that also needed a bit of work, albeit everything still fitted quite well. The flaps are separate and are installed in between the upper and wing half sub assembly - fixing into place later is also an option. The wing halves are affixed together without any major problems and can be attached to the forward nose section, or to the whole fuselage frame depending on how you want to go about it. I opted to follow the instructions, and gaps did result in the roots which needed to be filled.

The tailplanes fit well but you will spot an error in the instructions that tell you to put parts 86->87 and 84->85. This is where dry fit testing is such a must for model projects - you will discover the tailplane halves do not match up in this way and that actually is 84->87. The tail fins fit well but need a bit of filler around the roots to the fuselage join.

There is a good array of options in this kit ranging from a open cockpit to open weapon bays to underwing and bay weapon stores. The weapons bay can be modelled close and the pylons left off the wings for those who want to display an F-22 Raptor in the configuration you see it in just about every picture you can find! In terms of stores, there is a trapeze loading mechanism for the weapons bay plus a pair of AIM-9L/M Sidewinders and AIM-120C's. Four pylons are also provided for the wings, but only two other stores are included for attachment there.

Weapons bay is obviously intended to be displayed open because of the way they have molded the doors and parts. This was fine by me since I wanted to display the open bay, but a dry fit test run on doors closed reveal some fit problems and some very obvious need for trimming and filling. In fact through this dry run of closed bay doors I also discovered that the starboard sidewinder bay doors labelled in the instruction sheet were in fact for the port bay.

In the final construction stages and after some of the paint scheme had already been applied, the sub assembled undercarriage was added as was the canopy, all of which fit quite well. A tiny gap under the canopy needed a touch of filler to hide.

For painting I used two tone FS 36251 aircraft grey and FS 36176 Dark Gull Grey as the schemes. These were match with paints from the Humbrol range, while FS 36375 Light Ghost Grey was used for cockpit and other parts of the airframe as instructed.

Versions/Decals:

Only the first two production versions are provided in the kit as colour options bound in their typical low-viz grey glory. The decal sheet is quite extensive with a good amount of stencilling provided and colour depth in sharp register. Applying the decals to the model provided no problems whatsoever.

Accuracy:

Going by photos of the real aircraft, the model to capture all the lines and curves of the Raptor well. However, I am not convinced the weapon bay structure is shown accurately and there also are some minor shape errors around the nose and wings. I don't think the model is perfect by any means but it is basically accurate and still the only real game in town in this scale.

Overall Recommendation:

Recommended for those of you who want an F-22 in this quarter scale; Italeri have produced a satisfactorily accurate rendition of this aircraft that is in the main straight forward to build. The number of parts, including some of the detail required, plus a reasonable amount of sanding and filling means this is best attempted by those modellers with skills perhaps a notch above the novice category. Overall I enjoyed this project.

Related Reviews:-

Airfix 1/72 YF-22 Lightning II

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