RCAF CF-18 HORNET COLOR SET

Canadian Hornets in shades of gray

Canada took the McDonnell Douglas Hornet into service in the first half of the 1980s and marked the aircraft with its own numbering. They carried a tactical gray finish meant to blur the outline of the machine against the sky and against the ground, and one famous refinement: a second, false canopy outline was painted in black on the underside of the fuselage, so that an opponent in combat would lose any sense of where the aircraft was actually heading.

The three bottles cover the FS 35237, FS 36375 and FS 36118 shades. The first two make up the two-tone combination of the fuselage and the lifting surfaces; the third, markedly darker, belongs to details such as the areas around the cockpit, the radome and precisely that painted false outline.

The paints come from a line aimed at accuracy of period tones and are supplied in a 10 ml package. They are thinned with the manufacturer's own thinner and behave best in an airbrush, where they can be atomized into a very fine coat without trouble.

On modern gray machines the result is decided above all by what comes after the spraying. The panel lines, the exhaust staining and the walked-on areas on the wing are what separates a model of an aircraft in service from a smooth plastic mock-up. The set gives you the basis for that work.

The national insignia on these aircraft went through a change from colorful to subdued, barely perceptible outlines. If you are building a machine from the later part of its service, count on the difference between the insignia and the surrounding surface being only one of shade and of gloss. That is exactly where it pays to have all three tones at hand, because subdued markings are mixed from them and not from black paint.