Mitsubishi F-2 1/72 Hasegawa

My traditional visit of one modeller’s shop before Christmas time turned out as usual with at least three kits in my hands 🙂
One of them was a quite attractive F-2A, a prototype with some strange coloured weapons. I decided to add this one into my small prototypes collection. In fact, I have no detailed knowledge about those Japanese types. In the past, I was convinced this is Japanese 1:1 F-16. I was really wrong. The Mitsubishi F2 is different and a bit bigger than F-16 in order to fulfil Japanese Defence Force requirements.

The Hasegawa kit itself was a nice surprise. Model fits very well. There is only a lack of details in the cockpit. I added there Aires resin ACES II seat. As I get from internet photo with full test load, I had to make missing AAM-4 rockets with launchers from scratch. Everything else is OOB. Despite the big decal sheet containing orange and blue marking, I decided to mix and airbrush those colours. The most troubles for me were to apply red and green rectangles decals on to ASM-3 rocket. In addition, below you can see a description of the load on my F-2.

The load is listed from the centre to the wingtips:
– 600 gal drop tank
– AAM-4 missile (dummy or training for testing purposes) , it is derived rocket from AIM-7 Sparrow with slight modifications
– ASM-3 anti-ship missile (dummy or training for testing purposes)
– AAM-3 missile (dummy or training for testing purposes) it is derived rocket from AIM-9 Sidewinder.