Just received is one of the new sheets from The Aviation Workshop. This one is on the Tornado GR.4 and the covers five 90th anniversary schemes from 2005. All of these aircraft are in the current greys scheme of Dark Sea Grey over Dark Camouflage Grey. Since this is the 1/48 sheet, the kits available are limited to either the Airfix or Italeri kits. Neither one is an easy build, but either will make into a nice model if an effort is made during construction.

There are five schemes provided with this sheet and they cover 31 Squadron, 14 Squadron, 13 Squadron, 12 Squadron, and 9 Squadron.

The builder will have to do some painting and masking for most of these as two of them have black canopy areas/spines, one has a Roundel Blue fin and the other needs both Emerald Green and Roundel Blue painted prior to applying the decals.

Included with the sheets (and there are two of them) is an excellent, full color instruction booklet that devotes a full page to upper and lower markings placements. Each of the units gets a full page of side views and on each page are details of applying decals to the various pods and pylons. Complete color information is given for each scheme with references to not only BS381C standards, but also Humbrol, Xtracolor, Xtracrylix Lifecolor and Model Master paints, as are appropriate for each shade.

This huge sheet also includes a nearly full sheet of stencils and other data markings as are applied to the GR.4.  There are enough markings on this sheet to allow one aircraft to be built with the full stencil suite. Others that you may wish to build can use the stencils gleaned from the kit sheet as there are enough roundels and fin flashes provided for four aircraft. The decals themselves are superbly printed and appear to be in perfect registration. They are also quite thin and to that end spare segments of decal color are provided in case any touch-up is needed.

Overall, this is an exemplary sheet that fans of 'the fin' will have to have.

March 2006

Review sheet courtesy of The Aviation Workshop

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