Early USN & USMC Section Colours paint set

The color code of the American carrier sections

The interwar squadrons of the US Navy and the US Marine Corps wore what was probably the most colorful marking any military air arm has ever had. A squadron was divided into sections of three aircraft, and every section had its own assigned color, carried on the engine cowling and sometimes on a band around the fuselage as well. The section leader had the whole cowling in the color and his wingmen only a part of it, so the commander could read the formation from a distance with the naked eye. On top of that came the chrome yellow upper surface of the wing, which made an aircraft easier to find on the water.

The end of the color

The whole system ended at the turn of 1940 and 1941, when carrier aircraft received a blue-gray upper surface and a light gray underside. Models of biplanes and of the first monoplanes from the decks of Lexington, Saratoga or Enterprise nevertheless remain the most colorful thing that can be built, and that is exactly what this set is aimed at.

Working with the paint

The acrylic paint thins with water and is tuned for both brush and airbrush application. The saturated yellow and red tones need a light base, otherwise the plastic shows through them. It pays to paint the engine cowlings separately from the fuselage and fit them only at the end, because a hard transition is then far easier to achieve than by masking on an assembled model. The yellow upper surfaces of the wing, on the other hand, go on first, and the more saturated fuselage tone is masked over them, never the other way round. And because the period photographs are black and white, the shade is decided more by profile artwork and surviving regulations than by the pictures, so with a particular aircraft it pays to check which squadron and which section it belonged to.