1:48 F/A-18 SPAIN STANDARD MARKINGS + STENCILS

The Hornet in service with the Ejército del Aire

Spain picked the Hornet in the mid-1980s and from 1986 took delivery of seventy-two machines of the EF-18A and EF-18B versions, to which it assigned the domestic designations C.15 and CE.15 at home. The fleet later went through an upgrade to the standard with the plus suffix, and a second batch of airframes taken over from the US Navy was added to it. The Spanish Hornets flew with Ala 12 at Torrejón, with Ala 15 at Zaragoza and with Ala 46 on Gran Canaria, from where the airspace of the Canary Islands is guarded.

Sheet contents

This is not a sheet for a single fuselage number. Instead of one famous machine you get national insignia in the sizes that really do appear on Spanish Hornets, together with a continuous set of technical stencils. On the real aircraft this small lettering forms a dense network around the air intakes, the ejection seat, the filler ports and the hydraulic panels, and it is exactly what turns a smooth molding into a machine that has seen service.

Before you reach for water

The stencils are printed very small on the sheet, so it pays to work in small groups and to keep a magnifier at hand. Level the base first with gloss varnish, or a milky edge will appear under the thin film. The set fits any Hornet kit in 1:48 scale, and the leftover stencils will serve on further part-built examples of the same type.

Over their years of service the Spanish Hornets went through several changes of shade and of the way the stencils were applied to the airframe: older examples tended to have them in higher contrast, while on later ones the gray of the lettering comes close to the color of the skin. Depending on which period you are building, it is therefore worth either leaving the lettering bold or toning it down slightly with a filter once it is dry.