Panavia Tornado GR.1 RAF 1:72

I've been willing to build a Tonka for a long time. For me, this aircraft is clumsy, "kvadratisch", overloaded with protective pods, and it attracts me. After this journey is finally over, I feel a bit relieved and generally satisfied.

Initially, I planned to build a Marineflieger version, but I didn't find one and bought a RAF version instead to convert it (I even bought the decals). But I realized it will take a lot of effort, so I stuck to the post-Cold war British camo using the stock decals (which seemed quite OK for me). Now I understand I want to make a Marine version as well, with formidable missiles and stuff.

The kit from Revell seemed to be very decent: highly detailed landing gear and surfaces, rotatable pylons, lots of tiny parts. It turned out that the engineering is not wise, and it is challenging to assemble the model with all the parts fit. What's worse, I abandoned the proposed implementation of rotating stabilizer and pylons as well as the moving wing consoles because it would have taken much more time to paint and mask them before assembly began. Also, some very critical places of the model kit are poorly detailed, such as thrust reversers, seats, air intakes, etc.

Instead of a gloomy two-tone wrap-around Cold War camo, I went with the post-Cold War grey-on-grey which is quite unique and looks stylish from my perspective. I carefully selected and mixed paints from Vallejo (Dark Dull Gray for sides and bottom, Mid Sea Gray + Xtra Dark Sea Gray for top) so that the model looks lighter and neater, without this pessimistic "leaden" shade seen on its reference photos. I didn't want Tonka to look depressive.

I'm well aware that due to the use of thrust reversers Tonka's tail must be extremely dirty but I intentionally made the aircraft clean - it deserves to look like that 🙂

For the loadout, I selected the dumb 1000 lb bomb load; the bombs ares painted differently from the ubiquitous US bombs (I just hope I captured the color right). The rest is the usual pods and fuel tanks, and the Sidewinders, of course.