1/48 Accurate Miniatures Bell P-39 "Airacobra" 

by Ralph Emerson "Shonen Red" Dabao
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This is Accurate Miniatures' (ex-Eduard) offering of Bell P-39Q-1 Airacobra. The Airacobra is armed with two .50 cal machine guns in the cowl and another 37mm cannon in the nose of the aircraft. This variant, the P-39Q-1 has additional .50 cal machine guns on both wings. The engine of the craft is mounted in the mid section of the aircraft to provide a streamlined nose profile and to host the 37mm cannon. Due to it's design, the aircraft had the tendency to go into a flat spin.

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The kit is built entirely out of the box fashion. The details from the cockpit to the exterior panel lines look superb. Thanks to the included pre-formed mask, covering those clear parts is easy. In fact, if you weren't to paint this kit, you could build it in just a day! The box also has extra unused tidbits because you could do any P-39/P-400 of your choice. Checking other references is a must when you wanted to build other versions. The decals were made by Cartograf, and they look great. They're quite thin and a small coat of your favorite decal softener will fix the decals to the plane.

Despite being beautiful, the kit has some flaws. First, I wish Accurate Miniatures supplied a clear instrument panel just like their Dauntless that I've built two years ago. Second, there is a noticeable large gap when attaching the wings to the fuselage area. I recommend dryfitting first before gluing the wings. Last and if not the most deadly among all is that the plane is a tail sitter! I recommend adding weights to the front before gluing the halves of the fuselage. I noticed this only after placing the wheels after the kit was painted.

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Photos and text © by "Shonen Red'