SR-71A Blackbird

Overall, the product was good considering the age of the kit. You will need to fill the gaps in the underside wing sections when you glue the two main fuselage sections together, and a little for the horizontal stabilisers. The decals were suprisingly good. I omitted the landing gear and mounted it on a stand, and did not glue the canopies so that I could remove them to look at the cockpit details. For a low cost kit, it was value for money.

My father got me this model to build with my boys; knowing the grandsons would like this spaceship. The model had sat in its box in his garage a few years; as he planned to build it with another one of his grandsons but never got around to it. His loss was our gain. This is a quick build, that ends up looking awesome, particularly if, as in my case, I grew up thinking the Blackbird was the coolest plane on the planet. Hanging from the ceiling from a few feet away the plane looks like a professional built it despite my lack of modelling skills. PROS: The plane looks great and requires minimal painting and it goes together well, especially at the normally problematic in other models wing/fuselage area. CONS: The canopy is extremely difficult to get built well due to the size of the parts and making a wheels-up version requires a good amount of sculpting the wheel-well. My kids love the model!

I've allways looked for a blackbird. And this was the one I found. I've enjoyed building it, even if it was hard to disguise some of the seams without taking out the raised pannel details. Some of those details I do think they could be excessive, however, the corrugated titanium skin, which gave it a ford trimotor look, is well done. The ammount of detail is adequate, and the painting may be one of the simplest, as most of it is black, except for the exhaust nozzles. One detail is that it is not expressed that with the drone in piggy back mode, it may never be a SR-71 blackbird... The drone only goes on the back of a M12, a modified version of the A12 interceptor, but were soon out of commision because of danger of collision during launch. Even if the A12 does look like a SR-71, its actually slightly different airplanes... That should be mentioned on the manual... I did had problems with the decals: they looked wonderfull, and when I sprayed the matt final coating, they started to curl and unglue... I had the same problem on a Monogram B2, but I dare to say it was manufacturing problem... But there are plenty of aftermarket ones, and as long as you're carefull on the matt coating, everything may be ok. The airplane does look beautyful. My advice is to get it.