RAF colors Coastal Command 1939-1945

Patrols over the Atlantic

Coastal Command had a thankless job: hours of flying over empty water, searching for submarines and escorting convoys far from land. Sunderlands, Catalinas, Liberators and the attack Beaufighters needed a finish that would hide them from the crew of a submarine surfaced on the water. That is where the dark maritime tones on the upper surfaces came from, and in the later phase of the war a pure white underside, because that gives an approaching aircraft away least against the sky.

The eight in the package follow this development. It contains dark brown and dark green for land camouflage, a dark gray and a slate dark gray-green tone of the maritime specification, and further Sky, light blue, black and signal white. A modeler can therefore build a machine from the beginning of the war as well as a late patrol aircraft in a finish that differed markedly from the original camouflage.

Large surfaces, different rules

Flying boats and four-engine machines have enormous surfaces on which every transition shows. It helps to spray in layers across different directions, to check the coverage against the light as you go and to build the white over a light undercoat. It is thinned with water, and the paint has to be stirred again before every filling of the airbrush, because light pigments settle quickly.

On patrol machines the transition between the dark upper surfaces and the light underside ran high up the sides of the fuselage and tends to be sharp, so it deserves masking rather than a free spray-out. The package holds paints only, not a model, decals or clear coat.