1:32 P61 Black Widow Night Fighter

Night hunters over Iwo Jima

The Northrop P-61 was the first American aircraft designed as a night fighter from the outset: a twin-boom, twin engine heavyweight with radar in the nose and a crew of three. This sheet in 1:32 scale brings the markings of two machines of the B version which in the spring months of 1945 flew with the 548th Night Fighter Squadron from the island of Iwo Jima.

The aircraft with serial number 42-39454 carried the name Cooper Snooper, the second, 42-39525, bore the name Night Take-Off. From there the squadron patrolled over the sea and escorted operations against the Japanese islands; its machines took off in the dark from a freshly captured airfield that only a few weeks earlier had been the scene of some of the hardest fighting of the whole Pacific campaign.

How to get markings onto a black airframe

The Widow was painted a deep black, and it is on that very color that applying decals tends to be trickiest: a matte black surface absorbs light and every remnant of glossy film around the printing shines like a frame. Before applying them it therefore pays to spray the model with clear gloss varnish, to trim the motifs as close as possible and, once dry, to unify the whole surface again with a matte top coat.

In the large scale even the small things stand out that smaller models do not allow: crew name plates under the cockpit, warning lettering by the propellers or numerals on the nose gear leg. The set is intended for modelers who want to build a specific machine with a documented history rather than a general representative of the type. Before applying them it pays to go through photographs of the period, because the placement of lettering differed between individual machines of the squadron.