1:48 Mirage IIIE 13-QG 25 Ans Mirage IIIE EC1/13 Artois 1990

A quarter century with one type

Few units celebrate the anniversary of an aircraft rather than their own. The escadron 1/13 Artois did it: in 1990 it had one of its Mirage IIIE machines decorated for the twenty-five years the type had then served with the unit. That gives 1965 as the beginning of operation, and it is a figure that sits well in the time when French fighter units were moving en masse from subsonic equipment to the delta.

The machine carried the code 13-QG. The first part refers to the escadre; the pair of letters after the dash belonged to a particular airframe, so the finish was tied to a single aircraft. The Mirage IIIE was approaching the end of its service at that time and the jubilee artwork was therefore more a thank-you than an advertisement for the future.

The IIIE version was in its day the most widespread French form of this machine. Against the purely fighter IIIC it received a longer nose for the navigation electronics and it was also reckoned with for strikes on ground targets. That versatility gave it an unusually long career with the units and is also the reason why it lived to see several round celebrations.

Building and surface

Festive motifs of the turn of the 1980s and 1990s tend to be very broken up, with thin lines and small lettering. Decals like that will take neither a dry base nor a coarse brush. A surface polished to a high gloss, plenty of water and moving the decal with the tip of a brush rather than a finger have proved best.

The rest of the airframe stays in the ordinary gray-green camouflage of the French Mirage machines, so a model can be finished in the usual shades and the jubilee part comes last.