F/A-18 A/B/C/D

Fred Bergeron
I received this kit as a retirement gift from my colleagues and elected to build it as a CF-188B. The box had a sticker on the front indicating that it was a “Special Edition” without the metal landing gear and the vertical tails for the F/A-18A/B (?). There are tails in the kit but not the earlier versions used on the Canadian aircraft.

The plastic in this kit is excellent and builds nicely. The problem i encountered was with the documentation and Canadian decals provided!

The documentation I found in the sealed kit was lacking in resolution making it difficult to place the stencil data decals correctly. The documentation also lacks a side view of the Canadian markings so additional research is required to get location data.

Even if the documentation was crystal clear there is another problem with this kit in that the decal numbers on the included Canadian decal sheet do not match the call outs on the documentation!

I have reached out to Kinetic for an errata sheet but after a couple of months of email exchanges they are unable/unwilling to provide any corrected documentation. In their defense, this kit has been out of production for a few years but one would think that this obvious issue would have been addressed long ago and some sort of updated information would have been made available on line.

As I said a nice kit but these types of easily corrected errors take the joy out of the build.