Gee Bee Corsair

English Electric Sea Canberra

Eastern Express/Frog , 1/72

History

During the early 1970's, their lordships in the Admiralty realised that due to the burgeoning commitments to their carrier task forces world wide, the ever increasing potential threat's, and the lack of adequate land based maritime patrol coverage that there was a requirement for a self contained maritime patrol force to cover the carrier task forces and the ocean surrounding them.

A tender was put out for a suitable airframe, either a conversion or a new build, and about 10 or so proposals were put forward. These included entries from AW, Hawker, English Electric, Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed, Bolton Paul and Fairey. Over the next 10 months, the competition whittled down the entries to a final pair. Both were modified versions of current aircraft, The first was the Fairey Storm petrel, a modified Gannet. The other was the EE Sea Canberra. During an incredibly tight fly off competition, the English Electric entry finally won. Whilst the 'big wigs' at the Admiralty showed some brilliant insightful thinking over the new aircraft, they were incredibly dull when it cam to naming the plane. The official name was the Sea Canberra MR1. This, however, soon changed as soon as the new airframes reached the fleet. Navy crews, being what they are in the humour department, soon gave the plane the unofficial name of the 'Dolphin', due to the length and shape of the modified nose. In fact one air group commander, know for his wit, named his flight of 'Dolphins' the 'Flipper Flight'!. Needless to say this went down extremely well and became a source of fierce pride to the aircrews who flew them.

The Kit

The kit used was an Eastern Express'/Novo/Frog Canberra B(I)8.. There was no way in hell I was using my Frog one for this! The mods started off by creating a new weapons bay to replace the bomb bay. I scribed a new set of doors at the front, The rear of the bay was drilled out to represent launch tubes for sonarbouys.

The wingtips were cut off at the point where the tip tanks would normally attach and some lengths of spruce, sanded and put through a pencil sharpener to get the right effect at the tips, were attached as sensor pods. The tail fin was next for the butcher's knife. The tip was removed and a squared off and shaped length of spruce - see a pattern forming here?? - was attached as an RWR unit. The rear of the fuselage was squared off and more shaped spruce was added as a MAD boom.

The nose section, also the most 'interesting' part of the build was started on. To achieve this, firstly, the normal nose section was cut off in line with the side windows. Next, I took a couple of bits from the spares box, namely an unused nose cone and nacelle from a Matchbox Meteor NF11, reamed out the nacelle, dropped a 30 gram lead ball into it and attached it to the fuselage. Then the NF11's nose was attached to the nacelle and left to dry.

With the core of the new nose in place, polyfiller was liberally added to the kit in the rough shape of the fuselage contour and left to dry. Once it was dry, copious amounts of sanding and a bit of filling took place to get the contours melded in.

Painting, Decalling and Detailing

Whilst the building was going on, I toyed around with various colour schemes and eventually settled on Oxfords blue uppers and white undersides. The blue was HU104 matt Oxford Blue from Humbrol and the white, was about three coats of Halfords white primer, which went on very nicely indeed. The overall effect, I think, is pretty striking.

The decals were a mix of kit decals for the stencils, Xtracolor full colour roundels and the decal option for no. 700A flight from the Italeri SHAR 1 kit. That huge tail just screamed for some full colour artwork on it.

The underwing stores are a pair of 9L sidewinders for self defence and a pair of bombs, one from the spares box and one resin copy of the former, to simulate a pair of free fall depth charges. Again, the pylons for these were taken from the spares box. The final addition was a resin copy of a 100th scale phantom arrestor hook, which sized just about right..

Well, that's about it, I hope you like it.

Page created March 21, 2005