1:48 P-51D Mustang

The fighter that reached Berlin

The D version began arriving with the units of the Eighth Air Force in England from the spring of 1944 and changed the way the daylight bombing campaign was conducted. The British Merlin engine built under license by Packard gave the American airframe the high-altitude performance it had previously lacked, and drop tanks under the wing extended the range so far that the escort stayed with the formations entrusted to it for the whole route. On the sixth of March 1944 groups on these machines appeared over the German capital for the first time.

A teardrop canopy and the view to the rear

The cut-down fuselage decking and the one-piece domed glazing gave the pilot all-round vision that the earlier forms with a raised decking lacked. That is precisely why the cockpit is so visible on a model and precisely why it pays to have the frame sprayed rather than outlined with a brush. Six half-inch machine guns in the wing, a laminar-flow section and the radiator at the rear of the fuselage completed a machine on which the last months of the war and the escorts over Iwo Jima alike were flown.

What the sheet offers

The films mask the glazing from outside and from the inner face, so the framing stays clean even when looking into an open cockpit, and three stencils for spraying the national insignia are added. A sprayed insignia has no glossy rim of carrier film and takes later matting down without silvering.

The shape of the cut matches one particular release of the model, so lay the film against the clear part you intend to build before buying. Neither the model itself nor paints are in the bag.