F-5A Freedom Fighter (Shin Kazama)

The finished model:

In the manga:

The Area 88 manga is home to a wide variety of aircraft.  Besides the well-known “signature” planes, our heroes are often forced into flying temporary loaners.  One of these is the F-5A Freedom Fighter that forces Shin to make an emergency landing in an olive grove during a training flight in Greece [Chapter 054 (v04c09) “God and the Men of Twilight”].  Although it only appears in a couple of panels, it is an important part of the “Greek interlude.”  As the series catches its breath following the all-out assault on the Desert Aircraft Carrier, and before things start to heat up at the new Area 88 mountain base, the foreign mercenary unit retreats to the Greek training base for restructuring. There Shin begins to realize both the burden of command, and the fact that he may have become a true mercenary after all.

The kit(s):

• Northrop F-5A Skoshi Tiger USAF Supersonic Fighter by Wolfpack (ESCI rebox)

The build:

As I’ve mentioned before, my Area 88 1/72 scale project is really quite broad.  Basically any aircraft, tank, truck or whatever else I can find is up for grabs, as long as it appeared (or was even just mentioned) in the manga series.  So despite the fact that the F-5A only appears in a couple of panels (mostly just giving Shin engine trouble), I was happy to include it.

First off, it was an easy kit to find.  The Wolfpack rebox of the earlier ESCI kit was literally just sitting on a shelf at the local hobby shop in Seoul, so it didn’t take much to bring it home.  Moving it from the stash to the workbench didn’t take much of a push either.  There were two main reasons for that – a) I had so much fun building two F-8E Crusaders at once, that I thought there should be no reason not to give Shin’s F-5E Tiger II a ‘build buddy’ – especially since I’ve long been perplexed by exactly what tangible/visible differences there are between the two Northrop planes. And b) I was somewhat inspired to engage in a “parallel” build to the 2019 Scalemates Aggressor Group Build (there were a lot of F-5Es flying around that one) after including my Area 88 1/144 scale F-111 Aardvark build “A Dill Hill to Die On” in an earlier “Vark-fest” Group Build.

The build itself was pretty straightforward, so there’s not much to add beyond the photo album below.  The only thing I’ll say is that the old ESCI kit really is a gem.  The fit was great, the parts were detailed – so much so that a few of them got swapped out so I could consolidate all the best bits in my Shin’s F-5E Tiger II build.  Amazing that a kit of this vintage is still better than a lot of the more recently released ones.

I think it turned out, but feel free to lend me your comments below: