SCALE MODEL NEWS

SMN report It’s something of a helicopter time at the moment - the stealth machines used in the bin Laden raid, a possible European-issue NH90 stealth-design, and now the news that British Army WAH-64D Apache AH1s have been ordered into North Africa, operating from the amphibious assault ship HMS Ocean , in joint operations with French Eurocopter Tigers.  British Army Apache at RAF Fairford. Which Apache model to make? There are plenty of Apache models out there, including the diminutive 1:144 scale Revell kit, but for a complex machine like this with so much detail in the cockpits, weapons, and rotor assemblies, smaller models are not really the most satisfying way to go, and even 1:72 scale doesn’t appeal to us. No, in our view 1:48 is the best all-round scale for doing justice to this state-of-the-art attack helicopter. And for the easily-recognizeable ‘D’ version, which mounts a Longbow radar atop the rotor mast, both Italeri and Hasegawa kits make good starting points. Front c...

SMN report After news of the secret US stealth chopper that crashed during the bin Laden raid, and the previous NATO bombing of Colonel Gaddafi’s villa in Tripoli, Libya, it struck us that maybe - just maybe - there might be a European-issue stealth helo flying quiet and unseen through the night skies. We had a close look at likely candidates and reckon that the NH90 military helicopter fits the bill pretty well. It has a composite fuselage, a fairly stealthy faceted fuselage, retractable landing gear, and enough room to carry a fully-equipped SAS snatch team. Revell 1:72 scale NH90 kit box. EuroStealth helicopter to capture Gaddafi? The NH Industries machine has become a major success story, and a limited-edition stealth version would make financial sense, particularly if a small number of them were shared across the 11 Euroland countries that fly various versions of the NH90. The drawings show how a fairly minor airframe clean-up could give the NH90 the ‘quietness’ it needs to tackle...

SMN report Those news pictures of the crashed US stealth helicopter have certainly got the aerospace community hotted up with curiosity - and us model fans too. And now the respected Italian aviation writer David Cenciotti has linked up with skilled graphic artist Ugo Crisponi to show what a full-on stealth MH-60K could look like. The visualization, compared above with a standard machine, looks highly convincing and shows a sleek machine that's loaded with stealth features. German forces NH-90. Stealth design details Ugo Crisponi’s visual shows off many of the expected aspects of such a stealth machine, including a faceted fuselage cross-section, similar to that of the European NH-90 multi-role helicopter shown above. There are anti-radar discs over both rotor-heads, a shark-like nose that’s free of sensor protruberances, and - importantly - retractable landing gear. All these ‘smoothing’ design features go toward making such a machine far more likely to survive in a hostile combat...