Hasegawa 1/72 scale Sukhoi Su-33 “Flanker-D”

Hasegawa’s new tooling of the "Flanker-D" is well executed in gray plastic with beautifully engraved panel lines and fine surface detail.

The kit includes a full complement of weapons in addition to options for open or closed positioning of the canopy, speed brake, and louvered auxiliary air doors given as inserts for the intakes. An excellent cockpit tub is provided, with raised panel and console detail or, if you prefer, decals for the instruments.

Fit of parts wasn’t very good right around the “step joint” of the nose and the radome, but the rest of the model fairly snapped together with precision. A little putty was needed where the intake trunks fit the fuselage engine fairings. The landing gear and wheels are super, with the six-part nose gear building up into a neat little model all by itself. A modicum of detail is present in the nose gear well, but not so much in the mains.

The clear parts are a little on the thick side but are crystal clear. On my sample, a seam line ran down the exterior center of the canopy but was easily sanded and polished off.

The painting callouts reference only Gunze Sangyo’s Mr. Color line, with some Gunze acrylic equivalents given in places. I thought the RLM 65 blue specified for the undersides (plus the lightest color for the topside camouflage) was too dark, so I used Gunze H417 (RLM 76 blue) acrylic instead. The other colors I used were H45 light blue and H56 intermediate blue — the latter is a little too dark, but I wasn’t going back and repainting that complicated color scheme.

There are four sets of markings from which to choose, two aircraft from each Flanker squadron aboard the Admiral Kuznetsov. The decals are great: Full stenciling, opaque, right on register, and they went on beautifully, settling into all the detail. They’re a little more aggressive than those in other Hasegawa kits I’ve built, tending to stick where they’re first put down.

Ordnance? Wow! You get a box full — basically two sprues’ worth — and you can festoon the aircraft with as much firepower as it will hold if you wish. An external weapons chart is included to show where to hang what ordnance. I opted to arm my Flanker with an air-to-surface load of B8 FFAR rocket pods plus two R73 air-to-air missiles on the wingtip rails and two R77 missiles on the centerline racks. Kind of a “fight your way in, hit the target, and fight your way out” load.

This is a beautiful, well-engineered model, and, despite its size and number of parts, it’s actually a relatively simple build. The only reason I spent somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 hours building it was the masking required for the complex paint scheme.

Summary, with pun intended: Suuu-weet!