1:72 English Electric/BAC ‘Skyspark’ F.6; aircraft ‚F (s/n XR778)' of the Royal Air Force 11 Squadron; RAF Binbrook (Linconshire, Eastern UK), 1977 (What-if/kitbashing) - WiP
The kit and its assembly:
This build was a submission to the “Hunter, Lightning, Canberra” group build at whatifmodellers.com, and one of my personal ultimate challenges – a project that you think about very often, but the you put the thought back into its box when you realize that turning this idea into hardware will be a VERY tedious, complex and work-intensive task. But the thematic group build was the perfect occasion to eventually tackle the idea of a model of a “side-by-side engine BAC Lightning”, a.k.a. a “Flatning”, as a rather conservative alternative to its unique and unusual design with stacked engines in the fuselage, which brought a multitude of other design consequences that led to a really outstanding aircraft in history.
And it sound so simple: take a Lightning, just change the tail section. But it’s not that simple, because the whole fuselage shape would be different, resulting in less depth, the wings have to be attached somewhere and somehow, the landing gear might have to be adjusted/shortened, and how the fuselage diameter shape changes along the hull, so that you get a more or less smooth shape, was also totally uncertain!
Initially I considered a MiG Ye-152 as a body donor, but that was rejected due to the sheer price of the only available kit (ModelSvit). A Chinese Shenyang J-8I would also have been ideal – but there’s not 1:72 kit of this aircraft around, just of its successor with side intakes, a 1:72 J-8II from trumpeter.
I eventually decided to keep costs low, and I settled for the shaggy PM Model Su-15 (marketed as Su-21) “Flagon” as main body donor: it’s cheap, the engines have a good size for Avons and the pen nib fairing has a certain retro touch that goes well with the Lightning’s Fifties design.
The rest of this "Flatning" came from a Hasegawa 1:72 BAC Lightning F.6 (Revell re-boxing).
Massive modifications were necessary, though, and lots of PSR. In an initial step the Flagon lost its lower wing halves, which are an integral part of the lower fuselage half. The cockpit section was cut away where the intake ducts begin. The Lightning had its belly tank removed (set aside for a potential later re-installation), and dry-fitting and crude measures suggested that only the cockpit section from the Lightning, its spine and the separate fin would make it onto the new fuselage.
Integrating the parts was tough, though! The problem that caused the biggest headaches: how to create a "smooth" fuselage from the Lightning's rounded front end with a single nose intake that originally develops into a narrow, vertical hull, combined with the boxy and rather wide Flagon fuselage with large Phantom-esque intakes? My solution: taking out deep wedges from all (rather massive) hull parts along the intake ducts, bend the leftover side walls inwards and glue them into place, so that the width becomes equal with the Lightning's cockpit section. VERY crude and massive body work!
However, the Lightning's cockpit section for the following hull with stacked engines is much deeper than the Flagon's side-by-side layout. My initial idea was to place the cockpit section higher, but I would have had to transplant a part of the Lightning's upper fuselage (with the spine on top, too!) onto the "flat" Flagon’s back. But this would have looked VERY weird, and I'd have had to bridge the round ventral shape of the Lightning into the boxy Flagon underside, too. This was no viable option, so that the cockpit section had to be further modified; I cut away the whole ventral cockpit section, at the height of the lower intake lip. Similar to my former Austrian Hasegawa Lightning, I also cut away the vertical bulkhead directly behind the intake opening - even though I did not improve the cockpit with a better tub with side consoles. At the back end, the Flagon's jet exhausts were opened and received afterburner dummies inside as a cosmetic upgrade.
Massive PSR work followed all around the hull. The now-open area under the cockpit was filled with lead beads to keep the front wheel down, and I implanted a landing gear well (IIRC, it's from an Xtrakit Swift). With the fuselage literally taking shape, the wings were glued together and the locator holes for the overwing tanks filled, because they would not be mounted.
To mount the wings to the new hull, crude measurements suggested that wedges had to be cut away from the Lightning's wing roots to match the weird fuselage shape. They were then glued to the shoulders, right behind the cockpit due to the reduced fuselage depth. At this stage, the Lightning’s stabilizer attachment points were transplanted, so that they end up in a similar low position on the rounded Su-15 tail. Again, lots of PSR…
At this stage I contemplated the next steps, primarily: belly tank or not? The “Flatning” would have worked without it, but the profile would look rather un-Lightning-ish and rather “flat”. On the other side, a conformal tank would probably look quite strange on the new wide and flat ventral fuselage...? Only experiments could yield and answer, so I glued together the leftover belly bulge parts from the Hasegawa kit and played around with it. I also thought about a wider belly tank, but I guess that this would have looked too ugly. I eventually settled upon the narrow F.6 tank, and also used the section on which the arrestor hook rests. I just reduced its depth by ~2 mm with a slight slope towards the rear because I felt (righteously) that the higher wings would lower the model’s stance. More massive PSR…. As side benefit, though, the belly bulge could be sold as a kind of retrofitted ventral "Küchemann Carrot" to compensate for the wide waist (inspired by the F-102's pair of "butt-cheeks"). 😉
Due to the assumed poor ground clearance the Lightning’s stabilizing ventral fins were fitted directly under the fuselage edges rather than on the belly tank. Red Top pylons were mounted to the lower front fuselage and cable fairings, scratched from styrene profiles, were added to the lower flanks, stretching the hull optically and giving more structure to the hull.
To my surprise, I did not have to shorten the landing gear’s main legs! The wings ended up a little higher on the fuselage than on the original Lightning, and the front wheel sits a bit further back and deeper inside of its donor well, too, so that the fuselage comes probably 2 mm closer to the ground than an OOB Lightning model. Just like on the real aircraft, ground clearance is marginal, but when the main wheels were finally in place, the model had a low but proper stance, a little F8U-ish.
1:72 English Electric/BAC ‘Skyspark’ F.6; aircraft ‚F (s/n XR778)' of the Royal Air Force 11 Squadron; RAF Binbrook (Linconshire, Eastern UK), 1977 (What-if/kitbashing) - WiP
The kit and its assembly:
This build was a submission to the “Hunter, Lightning, Canberra” group build at whatifmodellers.com, and one of my personal ultimate challenges – a project that you think about very often, but the you put the thought back into its box when you realize that turning this idea into hardware will be a VERY tedious, complex and work-intensive task. But the thematic group build was the perfect occasion to eventually tackle the idea of a model of a “side-by-side engine BAC Lightning”, a.k.a. a “Flatning”, as a rather conservative alternative to its unique and unusual design with stacked engines in the fuselage, which brought a multitude of other design consequences that led to a really outstanding aircraft in history.
And it sound so simple: take a Lightning, just change the tail section. But it’s not that simple, because the whole fuselage shape would be different, resulting in less depth, the wings have to be attached somewhere and somehow, the landing gear might have to be adjusted/shortened, and how the fuselage diameter shape changes along the hull, so that you get a more or less smooth shape, was also totally uncertain!
Initially I considered a MiG Ye-152 as a body donor, but that was rejected due to the sheer price of the only available kit (ModelSvit). A Chinese Shenyang J-8I would also have been ideal – but there’s not 1:72 kit of this aircraft around, just of its successor with side intakes, a 1:72 J-8II from trumpeter.
I eventually decided to keep costs low, and I settled for the shaggy PM Model Su-15 (marketed as Su-21) “Flagon” as main body donor: it’s cheap, the engines have a good size for Avons and the pen nib fairing has a certain retro touch that goes well with the Lightning’s Fifties design.
The rest of this "Flatning" came from a Hasegawa 1:72 BAC Lightning F.6 (Revell re-boxing).
Massive modifications were necessary, though, and lots of PSR. In an initial step the Flagon lost its lower wing halves, which are an integral part of the lower fuselage half. The cockpit section was cut away where the intake ducts begin. The Lightning had its belly tank removed (set aside for a potential later re-installation), and dry-fitting and crude measures suggested that only the cockpit section from the Lightning, its spine and the separate fin would make it onto the new fuselage.
Integrating the parts was tough, though! The problem that caused the biggest headaches: how to create a "smooth" fuselage from the Lightning's rounded front end with a single nose intake that originally develops into a narrow, vertical hull, combined with the boxy and rather wide Flagon fuselage with large Phantom-esque intakes? My solution: taking out deep wedges from all (rather massive) hull parts along the intake ducts, bend the leftover side walls inwards and glue them into place, so that the width becomes equal with the Lightning's cockpit section. VERY crude and massive body work!
However, the Lightning's cockpit section for the following hull with stacked engines is much deeper than the Flagon's side-by-side layout. My initial idea was to place the cockpit section higher, but I would have had to transplant a part of the Lightning's upper fuselage (with the spine on top, too!) onto the "flat" Flagon’s back. But this would have looked VERY weird, and I'd have had to bridge the round ventral shape of the Lightning into the boxy Flagon underside, too. This was no viable option, so that the cockpit section had to be further modified; I cut away the whole ventral cockpit section, at the height of the lower intake lip. Similar to my former Austrian Hasegawa Lightning, I also cut away the vertical bulkhead directly behind the intake opening - even though I did not improve the cockpit with a better tub with side consoles. At the back end, the Flagon's jet exhausts were opened and received afterburner dummies inside as a cosmetic upgrade.
Massive PSR work followed all around the hull. The now-open area under the cockpit was filled with lead beads to keep the front wheel down, and I implanted a landing gear well (IIRC, it's from an Xtrakit Swift). With the fuselage literally taking shape, the wings were glued together and the locator holes for the overwing tanks filled, because they would not be mounted.
To mount the wings to the new hull, crude measurements suggested that wedges had to be cut away from the Lightning's wing roots to match the weird fuselage shape. They were then glued to the shoulders, right behind the cockpit due to the reduced fuselage depth. At this stage, the Lightning’s stabilizer attachment points were transplanted, so that they end up in a similar low position on the rounded Su-15 tail. Again, lots of PSR…
At this stage I contemplated the next steps, primarily: belly tank or not? The “Flatning” would have worked without it, but the profile would look rather un-Lightning-ish and rather “flat”. On the other side, a conformal tank would probably look quite strange on the new wide and flat ventral fuselage...? Only experiments could yield and answer, so I glued together the leftover belly bulge parts from the Hasegawa kit and played around with it. I also thought about a wider belly tank, but I guess that this would have looked too ugly. I eventually settled upon the narrow F.6 tank, and also used the section on which the arrestor hook rests. I just reduced its depth by ~2 mm with a slight slope towards the rear because I felt (righteously) that the higher wings would lower the model’s stance. More massive PSR…. As side benefit, though, the belly bulge could be sold as a kind of retrofitted ventral "Küchemann Carrot" to compensate for the wide waist (inspired by the F-102's pair of "butt-cheeks"). 😉
Due to the assumed poor ground clearance the Lightning’s stabilizing ventral fins were fitted directly under the fuselage edges rather than on the belly tank. Red Top pylons were mounted to the lower front fuselage and cable fairings, scratched from styrene profiles, were added to the lower flanks, stretching the hull optically and giving more structure to the hull.
To my surprise, I did not have to shorten the landing gear’s main legs! The wings ended up a little higher on the fuselage than on the original Lightning, and the front wheel sits a bit further back and deeper inside of its donor well, too, so that the fuselage comes probably 2 mm closer to the ground than an OOB Lightning model. Just like on the real aircraft, ground clearance is marginal, but when the main wheels were finally in place, the model had a low but proper stance, a little F8U-ish.