One of the success stories in trainers and light attack aircraft has been the Aermacchi MB.326. In addtion to being widely used in Italy, it has also been license built in Australia, Brazil, and South Africa. This sheet covers the Brazilian aircraft from 1982 until 2007 and it may well be that the aircraft is still in service. Embraer built 167 aircraft and exported some as well. These planes are quite similar to the Australian MB.326H and so require the thin tip tanks to be replaced by larger versions (available from OZ Mods). Brazilian aircraft were painted in a near-SEA scheme that uses FS34258 in place of the FS 34102 Green. Some of the aircraft on the sheet are shown with additional under wing fuel tanks.

Without going into a lot of detail, the main differences between the planes on the sheet are the serial numbers, unit badges and the tail bands. FCM seems to have pretty well covered just about every unit that ever flew one of these aircraft. One of the ten markings options has an unpainted metal areas on the lower nose under the cockpit and the instructions show both sides of this particular aircraft. Another option is for the Esq Alouette aircraft that had the underside painted with green and yellow sunbursts for flight displays. This will need to be painted by the builder, but it is very straight-forward and should be simple to mask.

The well drawn placement instructions include and upper view and full stencil map. There are enough insignia and data markings to do two full aircraft. The decals themselves are in perfect register and crisply printed by Microscale. For a kit, you'll need the ESCI MB.326, which has also been reissued by Italeri in the last several years.

Overall, it is another superlative sheet from FCM and if you have the kit in your stash, this is a perfect reason to break it out and start building.

October 2010