Modern Royal Air Force Paint set vol. 3

Sixty years of RAF trainers

British training aircraft went through several striking changes of dress from the 1950s onward, and this make-up of paints follows them one after another. It begins with the overall silver finish called High Speed Silver, which applied until 1966, and ends with the overall black coat that the BAe Hawk, the Short Tucano and training helicopters have worn since 1998.

The development of the finishes in shades

• Silver completed by the brilliant Day-Glo orange for good visibility, or by yellow training bands to the British standard BS381C:356.
• BS381C:627 Light Aircraft Grey took over the role of overall finish after 1966 and later made up the wings of the three-color scheme.
• White, BS381C:537 Signal Red and BS381C:110 Roundel Blue make up the well-known three-color scheme, which lasted from the early 1970s to 1998.
• Black, matching the BS381C:642 standard exactly, closes the development series.

The blue reached the upper decking and the tail surfaces only with the revision of the scheme in 1990, so a pair of models from different years looks different even on the same type of aircraft.

Properties of the coating

The binder of these bottles is a solvent-based lacquer and you will not thin it with water. The rich red and orange need a light base, otherwise their shade shifts toward brown. It pays to spray several light coats and to let them flash off. The silver then has the opposite nature: it covers easily but shows every scratch and fingerprint mercilessly, so the base under it must be perfectly smooth.