Thursday, 24 March 2011

YAK-38 'FORGER'

This pair of Yaks has been hanging around waiting to be painted since the Christmas holiday while I, for no apparent reason, agonised over painting them.  Photos I uncovered indicated that overall grey was the order of the day and this is what I finally went ahead with.  There were plenty of suitable (if rather fiddly) red stars (supplied by the excellent Dom's Decals) in the decals box, although I used red numbers rather than white as I had none of the latter in such a small size.

The FORGERs in flight.  I have had the models so long that I can't remember which manufacturer produced them.


I didn't have a 1/300 scale 'Kiev' to hand, so here are the FORGERs overflying one of a pair of plastic toy aircraft carriers I picked up some years ago.

Close-up of no.23 over the carrier.  On the deck just underneath the nose of the aircraft can be seen a small speaker grille.  Pressing as button on the flight deck produces a rather jolly 'whoosh' sound effect.  Er, so I'm told.
Expect to see these Yaks flying CAP over my Soviet Naval Infantry Regiment at some point.
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10 comments:

  1. Paul24 March 2011 at 09:36

    A trip down memory lane in seeing these two Forgers.

    Nice Post, and it made me google it to find out what happened to them.

    Regards Paul

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  2. Tim Gow24 March 2011 at 10:45

    Paul
    More Cold War comfort eh? Scary to think thet they are yesterday's news now.

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  3. Robert (Bob) Cordery24 March 2011 at 12:22

    Tim,

    Your aircraft carrier is similar to both mine, but looks the same size as my small one but with the sound system of the larger one (it comes with three different sound effects!).

    Nice models, by the way. I only wish that the UK had persisted with the P1154; we might be finding its later models useful these days!

    All the best,

    Bob

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  4. Tim Gow24 March 2011 at 14:04

    Bob
    So unlike the Royal Navy we have a carrier air group!
    I expect that Yakolev probably still have the tooling for the YAK-141 'Freestyle' - I wonder how much they'd knock them out at.

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  5. Paul´s Bods24 March 2011 at 16:46

    Nice looking jets.
    The aircraft carrier has sounds??! I´ll have to see one of these for real..:-D
    Cheers
    Paul

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  6. Tim Gow24 March 2011 at 16:50

    Paul's Bods
    It's a pretty ropey model and might benefit from painting. On the other hand it makes noises and as far as I can remember I bought two of them for less than £10 a few years back - when they were used to house the air support for a Vietnam game. I expect that the Forger pilots would be greatful for any ship they can land on!

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  7. ModernKiwi24 March 2011 at 21:33

    Poor old Forger pilots. Those things really were more of a menance to their pilots than to any western navy. At least they had that automatic ejection system for if any engine parts failed during landing.

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  8. Tim Gow24 March 2011 at 22:06

    ModernKiwi
    Yes - I gather that if the weather was warm they had a job on just getting airborne. Probably all that varnish I put over the intakes...

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  9. Paul27 March 2011 at 08:10

    I am pretty sure that the Forger pliots did not even land the deathtraps, it was all done by computer.

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  10. Tim Gow27 March 2011 at 14:02

    Paul
    If it was so completely rubbish I may need more!

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