Classic Airframes new 1/48 scale
Supermarine Attacker

by Fotios Rouch

  

Classic Airframes' 1/48 scale Supermarine Attacker may be ordered online from Squadron 

The Supermarine Attacker was the first jet fighter of the Fleet Air Arm.

It was a straight wing jet fighter that used the wing of the Spiteful on a new fuselage.

The Attacker was developed as an interim fighter for the RAF to fill an immediate need for a jet fighter. The solution was rejected since the straight wing Attacker was not any better than the Meteor and in response Supermarine offered a navalised version of the Attacker for the consideration of the FAA. The RAF went on with choosing the Meteor and the Vampire as its first two operational jets.

The first navalised prototype first flew in June 1947 with the first production aircraft entering service in 1951. Armament consisted of four Hispano 20 mm cannons and was powered by a Rolls-Royce Nene.

The FAA used 182 Attackers and 36 were sold to Pakistan.

The Supermarine Attacker was superseded quickly by other Supermarine jets like the Scimitar and Swift. The contemporaries of the Attacker were the MiG-15 and F-86 Sabre making it look very unsophisticated with its tail wheel and straight wings!

Up until now modelers have had two choices in 1/48 scale for the Attacker - the Falcon vacform kit and the resin Magna offering. Obviously both have been eclipsed by the Classic Airframes kit.

This kit arrived to my "lab" as an early production test shot and as such there were no instructions or photoetched parts included in the brown container box. The parts have the quality polished look that Classic Airframes sometimes exhibit in the past few years. No flash was present around the parts. The sprue gates, although somewhat thick, were easy to clean up in most areas and only the landing gear doors and clear canopy required a little more skill in cleaning up.

Some general notes about the engineering of the kit. First of all the master maker engineered it with ease of construction in mind. The fuselage is broken down into four parts. The front portion of the fuselage inserts itself inside the main fuselage body and thus creates a very accurate look with full depth intakes leading to the Nene fan. The internal bracing that contains the fan also includes two spars that extend out of the fuselage and are used to locate and support the wings. Also notable is that the front of the wing butt-joints include little locator pins. The model looks like it was done using the very nice Granger scale plans and pretty much every single panel line is present on the model.

The resin parts included are very well molded with no defects and completely pin-hole free. The ejection seat is very well done and can even slide up and down its rail! Too bad all has to be painted black and be lost in a black hole (note: dark grey shades can be used to give some depth to the cockpit). Another part I really enjoyed was the resin tail pipe and how it integrates to the resin tail wheel well. Nicely detailed area and fun to build. A belly tank is also included in the kit but I did not use it since it does little to improve the aircraft's looks.

One comment I would like to made is that I really wish Classic Airframes would consider giving us back our nice vacuformed canopies. They do so much for the look of a model.

I decided to cut the canopy open to show the nicely detailed interior a bit better.

I also fabricated the pitot tubes and various antennas as well as the fuel dump since the photoetch parts were not produced yet.

The decals were nicely printed (the winged greyhounds are actually printed with gold pigment) and went down very well. Remember to trace and cut the bottom wing numbers before you glue the landing gear since the numbers go over a portion of the landing gear doors.

I used White Ensign enamel paints for the Attacker which went on very smoothly and produced a nice satin sheen. They take a while to dry but experimenting showed that they dry much faster if thinned with Xtracolor thinner.

I cannot say that this model is the prettiest jet in my collection but it is a very well done kit and plenty important to all the early jet collections.

My sincere thanks to Classic Airframes for this preview sample.

Click the thumbnails below to view larger images: 

Model, Images and Text Copyright © 2005 by Fotios Rouch
Page Created 08 September, 2005
Last Updated 07 September, 2005

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