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!

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!

Ok as the title insists, this is a pretty large kit even for its 1/72 scale size. It's molded in black plastic so if you're not so great at painting large parts you can leave it alone, however doing this greatly reduces the beauty of this plane as the casting imperfections are highly visible. To get the best finish I would prime the entire fuselage and then spray on some flat or satin black. It's also fairly easy to add lights to the cockpit and the detail inside is pretty good for the scale of the kit. The fuselage fits together in such a way that the seam where the two halves join is next to invisible. The smaller drone aircraft is also a nice bonus and can be mounted on the SR-71 with a little modification, which only involves drilling out two holes on top of the plane, or on the included cart. The decals are ok, nothing really special but they look ok. Along with the positive comes the negative. Some of the parts are too firmly attached to the sprue. If you are not careful you can easily damage these pieces and in turn the entire look of the plane. Still overall this is a nice kit and worthy of the build. The only reason I didn't give it the final star was because of the issues around the overly attached pieces.