left) U.S. Army Sgt. Christopher Kennedy, a native of Shelton, Wash., and U.S. Army Spc. James Zollman, a native of Crossett, Ark., look out the door of a UH-60 Black Hawk at the aerial view a district of Baghdad, Iraq during a leaflet drop in support of Operation Iron Horse Blizzard on Oct. 3, 2008. Kennedy and Zollman are members of Delta Company, Special Troops Battalion, 4th Infantry Division.

U.S. Army Cpl. Marc Vero of the 2-113th Infantry Battalion, New Jersey National Guard patrols a road near the village of Orgun, Paktika province, Afghanistan, July 28. The purpose of the mission was to provide security for the Paktika Provincial Reconstruction Team, who supports stability operations in the village.

Joint Combat Camera Afghanistan

Photo by Spc. George Hunt

Date Taken:07.28.2011

Location:ORGUN, AF

Related Photos: dvidshub.net/r/5bv3zo

 

U.S. paratroopers return after completing their jumps in participation for the 18th Annual Randy Oler Memorial Operation Toy Drop, hosted by U.S. Army Civil Affairs & Psychological Operations Command (Airborne), Dec. 4, 2015, at Fort Bragg, N.C. Operation Toy Drop is one of the world’s largest combined airborne operations and allows soldiers the opportunity to help children in need receive toys for the holidays. (U.S. Army Sgt. Neil Stanfield)

+++ DISCLAIMER +++

Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based on historical facts. BEWARE!

  

Some background:

The Cessna Model 336 and 337 “Skymaster” were American twin-engine civil utility aircraft built in a unique push-pull configuration. Their engines were mounted in the nose and rear of its pod-style fuselage. Twin booms extended aft of the wings to the vertical stabilizers, with the rear engine between them. The horizontal stabilizer was aft of the pusher propeller, mounted between and connecting the two booms.

 

The first Skymaster, Model 336, had fixed landing gear and initially flew on February 28, 1961. It went into production in May 1963 with 195 being produced through mid-1964. In February 1965, Cessna introduced the larger Model 337 Super Skymaster with more powerful engines, retractable landing gear, and a dorsal air scoop for the rear engine (the "Super" prefix was subsequently dropped from the name). In 1966, the turbocharged T337 was introduced, and in 1973, the pressurized P337G entered production.

The type was very prolific and Cessna built 2.993 Skymasters of all variants, including 513 military O-2 (nicknamed "Oscar Deuce") versions from 1967 onwards. The latter featured underwing ordnance hard points to hold unguided rockets, gun pods or flares, and served in the forward air control (FAC) role and psychological operations (PSYOPS) by the US military between 1967 and 2010. Production in America ended in 1982, but was continued by Reims in France, with the FTB337 STOL and the military FTMA “Milirole”.

 

Both civil and military Cessna 336/337 version had long service careers, and some were considerably modified for new operators and uses. Among the most drastic conversions was the Spectrum SA-550, built by Spectrum Aircraft Corporation of Van Nuys, California, in the mid-1980s: Spectrum took the 336/337 airframe and removed the front engine, lengthened the nose to maintain the center of gravity, and replaced the rear piston engine with a pusher turboprop which offered more power than the combined pair of original petrol engines. The Spectrum SA-550 conversion also came together with an optional modernization package that prolonged the airframes’ service life, so that modified machines could well serve on for 20 years or more.

 

This drastic conversion was executed for both military and civil operators. The best-known military SA-550s were six former USAF O-2A airframes, which had been transferred to the U.S. Navy in 1983 for use as range controllers with VA-122 at NAS Lemoore, California. These aircraft were operationally nicknamed “Pelican”, due to the characteristic new nose shape, and the name unofficially caught on.

However, the SA-550 package was only adopted sporadically by private operators, but it became quite popular among several major police and fire departments. Typical duties for these machines included border/drug patrol, surveillance/observation duties (e.g. traffic, forest fire) and special tasks, including drug interdiction as well for SAR missions and undercover operations like narcotics and serialized criminal investigations. Some SA-550s were accordingly modified and individually outfitted with suitable sensors, including IR/low light cameras, searchlights, and internal auxiliary tanks. None were armed, even though some aircraft featured underwing hardpoints for external extra tanks, flare dispensers for nocturnal operations or smoke charge dispensers for ground target marking to guide water bombers to hidden forest fires.

 

The type’s versatility, low noise level, high travel speed and good loitering time in the operational area at low speed proved to be vital assets for these public service operators and justified its relatively high maintenance costs. A handful of the modernized Spectrum SA-550 machines were still in active service after the Millennium, primarily in the USA.

  

General characteristics:

Crew: 1 + 3 passengers (up to 5 passengers possible in special seat configuration)

Length: 32 ft 6½ in (9.94 m)

Wingspan: 38 ft ¾ in (11.62 m)

Height: 9 ft 2 in (2.79 m)

Wing area: 201 sq ft (18.81 m²)

Aspect ratio: 7.18:1

Airfoil: NACA 2412 at root, NACA 2409 at tip

Empty weight: 2,655 lb (1,204 kg)

Max takeoff weight: 4,400 lb (1,996 kg)

Fuel capacity: 92 US gal (77 imp gal; 350 l) normal,

128 US gal (107 imp gal; 480 l) with auxiliary tank

in the cabin instead of two passenger seats

 

Powerplant:

1× Pratt & Whitney PT6A-27 turboprop engine, delivering 550 shp (410 kW) and

driving a four-blade McCauley fully-feathering, constant-speed propeller, 6 ft 4 in (1.93 m) diameter

 

Performance:

Maximum speed: 199 mph (320 km/h, 173 kn) at sea level

Cruise speed: 144 mph (232 km/h, 125 kn) at 10,000 ft (3,000 m) (econ cruise)

Stall speed: 69 mph (111 km/h, 60 kn)

Range: 1421 mi (2.288 km, 1.243 nmi) at 10.000 ft (3.050 m) altitude and economy cruise

Service ceiling: 19,500 ft (5,900 m)

Rate of climb: 1,200 ft/min (6.1 m/s)

Takeoff distance to 50 ft (15m): 1,545 ft (471 m)

Landing distance from 50 ft (15m): 1,650 ft (500 m)

  

The kit and its assembly:

This build is the combination of ingredients that had already been stashed away for a long time, and the “Red Lights” Group Build at whatifmodellers.com in early 2021 was a good motivator and occasion to finally put everything together.

 

The basis is an ARII 1:72 Cessna T337 model kit – I had purchased it long ago with the expectation to create a military Skymaster from it, but I was confused by a fixed landing gear which would make it a 336? Well, without a further concrete plan the kit preliminarily landed in The Stash™…

However, the ARII model features the optional observation windows in the doors on the starboard side, in the form of a complete(!) fuselage half, so that it lends itself to a police or firefighter aircraft of some sort. This idea was furthermore fueled by a decal sheet that I had been given from a friend, left over from a 1:72 Italeri JetRanger, with three optional police helicopter markings.

The final creative element was the real-world “Pelican” conversion of six O-2As for the US Navy, as mentioned in the background above: the front engine was replaced with a longer nose and the engine configuration changed to a pusher-only aircraft with a single powerful turboprop engine. This looked so odd that I wanted to modify the ARII Cessna in a similar fashion, too, and all these factors came together in this model.

 

My Arii Cessna 337 kit is a re-boxing from 2009, but its origins date back to Eidai in 1972 and that’s just what you get: a vintage thing with some flash and sinkholes, raised (but fine) surface details and pretty crude seams with bulges and gaps. Some PSR is direly necessary, esp. the fit of the fuselage halves is cringeworthy. The clear parts were no source of joy, either; especially the windscreen turned out to be thick, very streaky (to a degree that I’d almost call it opaque!) and even not fully molded! The side glazing was also not very clear. I tried to improve the situation through polishing, but if the basis is already poor, there’s little you can do about it. Hrmpf.

 

However, the kit was built mostly OOB, including the extra O-2 glazing in the lower doors, but with some mods. One is a (barely visible) extra tank in the cabin’s rear, plus a pilot and an observer figure placed into the tight front seats. The extended “Pelican” nose was a lucky find – I was afraid that I had had to sculpt a nose from scratch with 2C putty. But I found a radome from a Hasegawa RA-5C, left over from a model I built in the Eighties and that has since long fallen apart. However, this nose fitted almost perfectly in size and shape, I just “blunted” the tip a little. Additionally, both the hull in front of the dashboard and the Vigilante radome were filled with as many lead beads as possible to keep the nose down.

 

The kit’s OOB spatted, fixed landing gear was retained – even though it is dubious for a Cessna 337, because this type had a fully retractable landing gear, and the model has the landing gear covers actually molded into the lower fuselage. On the other side, the Cessna 336’s fixed landing gear looks quite different, too! However, this is a what-if model, and a fixed landing gear might have been a measure to reduce maintenance costs?

 

The propeller was replaced with a resin four-blade aftermarket piece (from CMK, probably the best-fitting thing on this build!) on my standard metal axis/styrene tube adapter arrangement. The propeller belongs to a Shorts Tucano, but I think that it works well on the converted Cessna and its powerful pusher engine, even though in the real world, the SA-550 is AFAIK driven by a three-blade prop. For the different engine I also enlarged the dorsal air intake with a 1.5 mm piece of styrene sheet added on top of the molded original air scoop and added a pair of ventral exhaust stubs (scratched from sprue material).

Another addition is a pair of winglets, made from 0.5 mm styrene sheet – an upgrade which I found on several late Cessna 337s in various versions. They just add to the modernized look of the aircraft. For the intended observation role, a hemispherical fairing under the nose hides a 180° camera, and I added some antennae around the hull.

 

However, a final word concerning the model kit itself: nothing fits, be warned! While the kit is a simple affair and looks quite good in the box, assembling it turned out to be a nightmare, with flash, sinkholes, a brittle styrene and gaps everywhere. This includes the clear parts, which are pretty thick and blurry. The worst thing is the windscreen, which is not only EXTRA thick and EXTRA blurry, it was also not completely molded, with gaps on both sides. I tried to get it clearer through manual polishing, but the streaky blurs are integral – no hope for improvement unless you completely replace the parts! If I ever build a Cessna 337/O-2 again, I will give the Airfix kit a try, it can only be better…

  

Painting and markings:

The choice between the operator options from the JetRanger sheet was hard, it included Sweden and Italy, but I eventually settled for the LAPD because the livery looks cool and this police department not only operates helicopters, but also some fixed-wing aircraft.

 

I adapted the LAPD’s classic black-and-white police helicopter livery (Gloss White and Black, Humbrol 22 and 21, respectively) to the Cessna and extended it to the wings. At this point – already upset because of the poor fit of the hardware – disaster struck in the form of Humbrol’s 22 turning into a pinkish ivory upon curing! In the tin, the paint and its pigments looked pretty white and “clean”, and I assume that it’s the thinner that caused this change. What a crap! It’s probably the third tin with 22 that causes trouble, even though in different peculiarities!

The result was total rubbish, though, and I tried to rub the paint off as good as possible on the small model with its many windows, the fixed, delicate landing gear and the wing support struts. Then I overpainted the areas with Revell 301 (Semi-matt White). While this enamel yielded the intended pure white tone, the paint itself is rather gooey and not easy to work with, so that the overall finish turned out worse than desired. At least the black paint worked properly. The demarcations were created with black decal stripes (TL Modellbau), because the tiny model left little room for complex masking measures – and I did not risk any more painting accidents.

 

Since the aircraft would be kept shiny and clean, I just did a light black ink washing to emphasize surface details and did a light panel post-shading on the black areas, not for weathering but rather to accent surface structures. No further weathering was done (and necessary).

 

The markings/decals come – as mentioned above – from an Italeri 1:72 JetRanger, but they were augmented with some additional markings, e. g. grey walkways on the wings and “L-A-P-D” in large black letters under the wings, to distract from the poor finish of the white paint around them…

Finally, the kit was sealed overall with Italeri semi-gloss acrylic varnish, just with a matt anti-glare shield in front of the windscreen, which received thin white trim lines (generic decal stripes).

  

A challenging build due to the Arii kit’s rather poor basis, the massive rhinoplasty and the crisp paint scheme. However, I like the result – what-if models do not always have to be armed military vehicles, there’s potential in other genres, too. And this mono-engine “Pelican” Skymaster plays its role as a “flying eye” in police service credibly and well. However, this was my first and last Eidai kit…

+++ DISCLAIMER +++

Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based on historical facts. BEWARE!

  

Some background:

The Cessna Model 336 and 337 “Skymaster” were American twin-engine civil utility aircraft built in a unique push-pull configuration. Their engines were mounted in the nose and rear of its pod-style fuselage. Twin booms extended aft of the wings to the vertical stabilizers, with the rear engine between them. The horizontal stabilizer was aft of the pusher propeller, mounted between and connecting the two booms.

 

The first Skymaster, Model 336, had fixed landing gear and initially flew on February 28, 1961. It went into production in May 1963 with 195 being produced through mid-1964. In February 1965, Cessna introduced the larger Model 337 Super Skymaster with more powerful engines, retractable landing gear, and a dorsal air scoop for the rear engine (the "Super" prefix was subsequently dropped from the name). In 1966, the turbocharged T337 was introduced, and in 1973, the pressurized P337G entered production.

The type was very prolific and Cessna built 2.993 Skymasters of all variants, including 513 military O-2 (nicknamed "Oscar Deuce") versions from 1967 onwards. The latter featured underwing ordnance hard points to hold unguided rockets, gun pods or flares, and served in the forward air control (FAC) role and psychological operations (PSYOPS) by the US military between 1967 and 2010. Production in America ended in 1982, but was continued by Reims in France, with the FTB337 STOL and the military FTMA “Milirole”.

 

Both civil and military Cessna 336/337 version had long service careers, and some were considerably modified for new operators and uses. Among the most drastic conversions was the Spectrum SA-550, built by Spectrum Aircraft Corporation of Van Nuys, California, in the mid-1980s: Spectrum took the 336/337 airframe and removed the front engine, lengthened the nose to maintain the center of gravity, and replaced the rear piston engine with a pusher turboprop which offered more power than the combined pair of original petrol engines. The Spectrum SA-550 conversion also came together with an optional modernization package that prolonged the airframes’ service life, so that modified machines could well serve on for 20 years or more.

 

This drastic conversion was executed for both military and civil operators. The best-known military SA-550s were six former USAF O-2A airframes, which had been transferred to the U.S. Navy in 1983 for use as range controllers with VA-122 at NAS Lemoore, California. These aircraft were operationally nicknamed “Pelican”, due to the characteristic new nose shape, and the name unofficially caught on.

However, the SA-550 package was only adopted sporadically by private operators, but it became quite popular among several major police and fire departments. Typical duties for these machines included border/drug patrol, surveillance/observation duties (e.g. traffic, forest fire) and special tasks, including drug interdiction as well for SAR missions and undercover operations like narcotics and serialized criminal investigations. Some SA-550s were accordingly modified and individually outfitted with suitable sensors, including IR/low light cameras, searchlights, and internal auxiliary tanks. None were armed, even though some aircraft featured underwing hardpoints for external extra tanks, flare dispensers for nocturnal operations or smoke charge dispensers for ground target marking to guide water bombers to hidden forest fires.

 

The type’s versatility, low noise level, high travel speed and good loitering time in the operational area at low speed proved to be vital assets for these public service operators and justified its relatively high maintenance costs. A handful of the modernized Spectrum SA-550 machines were still in active service after the Millennium, primarily in the USA.

  

General characteristics:

Crew: 1 + 3 passengers (up to 5 passengers possible in special seat configuration)

Length: 32 ft 6½ in (9.94 m)

Wingspan: 38 ft ¾ in (11.62 m)

Height: 9 ft 2 in (2.79 m)

Wing area: 201 sq ft (18.81 m²)

Aspect ratio: 7.18:1

Airfoil: NACA 2412 at root, NACA 2409 at tip

Empty weight: 2,655 lb (1,204 kg)

Max takeoff weight: 4,400 lb (1,996 kg)

Fuel capacity: 92 US gal (77 imp gal; 350 l) normal,

128 US gal (107 imp gal; 480 l) with auxiliary tank

in the cabin instead of two passenger seats

 

Powerplant:

1× Pratt & Whitney PT6A-27 turboprop engine, delivering 550 shp (410 kW) and

driving a four-blade McCauley fully-feathering, constant-speed propeller, 6 ft 4 in (1.93 m) diameter

 

Performance:

Maximum speed: 199 mph (320 km/h, 173 kn) at sea level

Cruise speed: 144 mph (232 km/h, 125 kn) at 10,000 ft (3,000 m) (econ cruise)

Stall speed: 69 mph (111 km/h, 60 kn)

Range: 1421 mi (2.288 km, 1.243 nmi) at 10.000 ft (3.050 m) altitude and economy cruise

Service ceiling: 19,500 ft (5,900 m)

Rate of climb: 1,200 ft/min (6.1 m/s)

Takeoff distance to 50 ft (15m): 1,545 ft (471 m)

Landing distance from 50 ft (15m): 1,650 ft (500 m)

  

The kit and its assembly:

This build is the combination of ingredients that had already been stashed away for a long time, and the “Red Lights” Group Build at whatifmodellers.com in early 2021 was a good motivator and occasion to finally put everything together.

 

The basis is an ARII 1:72 Cessna T337 model kit – I had purchased it long ago with the expectation to create a military Skymaster from it, but I was confused by a fixed landing gear which would make it a 336? Well, without a further concrete plan the kit preliminarily landed in The Stash™…

However, the ARII model features the optional observation windows in the doors on the starboard side, in the form of a complete(!) fuselage half, so that it lends itself to a police or firefighter aircraft of some sort. This idea was furthermore fueled by a decal sheet that I had been given from a friend, left over from a 1:72 Italeri JetRanger, with three optional police helicopter markings.

The final creative element was the real-world “Pelican” conversion of six O-2As for the US Navy, as mentioned in the background above: the front engine was replaced with a longer nose and the engine configuration changed to a pusher-only aircraft with a single powerful turboprop engine. This looked so odd that I wanted to modify the ARII Cessna in a similar fashion, too, and all these factors came together in this model.

 

My Arii Cessna 337 kit is a re-boxing from 2009, but its origins date back to Eidai in 1972 and that’s just what you get: a vintage thing with some flash and sinkholes, raised (but fine) surface details and pretty crude seams with bulges and gaps. Some PSR is direly necessary, esp. the fit of the fuselage halves is cringeworthy. The clear parts were no source of joy, either; especially the windscreen turned out to be thick, very streaky (to a degree that I’d almost call it opaque!) and even not fully molded! The side glazing was also not very clear. I tried to improve the situation through polishing, but if the basis is already poor, there’s little you can do about it. Hrmpf.

 

However, the kit was built mostly OOB, including the extra O-2 glazing in the lower doors, but with some mods. One is a (barely visible) extra tank in the cabin’s rear, plus a pilot and an observer figure placed into the tight front seats. The extended “Pelican” nose was a lucky find – I was afraid that I had had to sculpt a nose from scratch with 2C putty. But I found a radome from a Hasegawa RA-5C, left over from a model I built in the Eighties and that has since long fallen apart. However, this nose fitted almost perfectly in size and shape, I just “blunted” the tip a little. Additionally, both the hull in front of the dashboard and the Vigilante radome were filled with as many lead beads as possible to keep the nose down.

 

The kit’s OOB spatted, fixed landing gear was retained – even though it is dubious for a Cessna 337, because this type had a fully retractable landing gear, and the model has the landing gear covers actually molded into the lower fuselage. On the other side, the Cessna 336’s fixed landing gear looks quite different, too! However, this is a what-if model, and a fixed landing gear might have been a measure to reduce maintenance costs?

 

The propeller was replaced with a resin four-blade aftermarket piece (from CMK, probably the best-fitting thing on this build!) on my standard metal axis/styrene tube adapter arrangement. The propeller belongs to a Shorts Tucano, but I think that it works well on the converted Cessna and its powerful pusher engine, even though in the real world, the SA-550 is AFAIK driven by a three-blade prop. For the different engine I also enlarged the dorsal air intake with a 1.5 mm piece of styrene sheet added on top of the molded original air scoop and added a pair of ventral exhaust stubs (scratched from sprue material).

Another addition is a pair of winglets, made from 0.5 mm styrene sheet – an upgrade which I found on several late Cessna 337s in various versions. They just add to the modernized look of the aircraft. For the intended observation role, a hemispherical fairing under the nose hides a 180° camera, and I added some antennae around the hull.

 

However, a final word concerning the model kit itself: nothing fits, be warned! While the kit is a simple affair and looks quite good in the box, assembling it turned out to be a nightmare, with flash, sinkholes, a brittle styrene and gaps everywhere. This includes the clear parts, which are pretty thick and blurry. The worst thing is the windscreen, which is not only EXTRA thick and EXTRA blurry, it was also not completely molded, with gaps on both sides. I tried to get it clearer through manual polishing, but the streaky blurs are integral – no hope for improvement unless you completely replace the parts! If I ever build a Cessna 337/O-2 again, I will give the Airfix kit a try, it can only be better…

  

Painting and markings:

The choice between the operator options from the JetRanger sheet was hard, it included Sweden and Italy, but I eventually settled for the LAPD because the livery looks cool and this police department not only operates helicopters, but also some fixed-wing aircraft.

 

I adapted the LAPD’s classic black-and-white police helicopter livery (Gloss White and Black, Humbrol 22 and 21, respectively) to the Cessna and extended it to the wings. At this point – already upset because of the poor fit of the hardware – disaster struck in the form of Humbrol’s 22 turning into a pinkish ivory upon curing! In the tin, the paint and its pigments looked pretty white and “clean”, and I assume that it’s the thinner that caused this change. What a crap! It’s probably the third tin with 22 that causes trouble, even though in different peculiarities!

The result was total rubbish, though, and I tried to rub the paint off as good as possible on the small model with its many windows, the fixed, delicate landing gear and the wing support struts. Then I overpainted the areas with Revell 301 (Semi-matt White). While this enamel yielded the intended pure white tone, the paint itself is rather gooey and not easy to work with, so that the overall finish turned out worse than desired. At least the black paint worked properly. The demarcations were created with black decal stripes (TL Modellbau), because the tiny model left little room for complex masking measures – and I did not risk any more painting accidents.

 

Since the aircraft would be kept shiny and clean, I just did a light black ink washing to emphasize surface details and did a light panel post-shading on the black areas, not for weathering but rather to accent surface structures. No further weathering was done (and necessary).

 

The markings/decals come – as mentioned above – from an Italeri 1:72 JetRanger, but they were augmented with some additional markings, e. g. grey walkways on the wings and “L-A-P-D” in large black letters under the wings, to distract from the poor finish of the white paint around them…

Finally, the kit was sealed overall with Italeri semi-gloss acrylic varnish, just with a matt anti-glare shield in front of the windscreen, which received thin white trim lines (generic decal stripes).

  

A challenging build due to the Arii kit’s rather poor basis, the massive rhinoplasty and the crisp paint scheme. However, I like the result – what-if models do not always have to be armed military vehicles, there’s potential in other genres, too. And this mono-engine “Pelican” Skymaster plays its role as a “flying eye” in police service credibly and well. However, this was my first and last Eidai kit…

+++ DISCLAIMER +++

Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based on historical facts. BEWARE!

  

Some background:

The Cessna Model 336 and 337 “Skymaster” were American twin-engine civil utility aircraft built in a unique push-pull configuration. Their engines were mounted in the nose and rear of its pod-style fuselage. Twin booms extended aft of the wings to the vertical stabilizers, with the rear engine between them. The horizontal stabilizer was aft of the pusher propeller, mounted between and connecting the two booms.

 

The first Skymaster, Model 336, had fixed landing gear and initially flew on February 28, 1961. It went into production in May 1963 with 195 being produced through mid-1964. In February 1965, Cessna introduced the larger Model 337 Super Skymaster with more powerful engines, retractable landing gear, and a dorsal air scoop for the rear engine (the "Super" prefix was subsequently dropped from the name). In 1966, the turbocharged T337 was introduced, and in 1973, the pressurized P337G entered production.

The type was very prolific and Cessna built 2.993 Skymasters of all variants, including 513 military O-2 (nicknamed "Oscar Deuce") versions from 1967 onwards. The latter featured underwing ordnance hard points to hold unguided rockets, gun pods or flares, and served in the forward air control (FAC) role and psychological operations (PSYOPS) by the US military between 1967 and 2010. Production in America ended in 1982, but was continued by Reims in France, with the FTB337 STOL and the military FTMA “Milirole”.

 

Both civil and military Cessna 336/337 version had long service careers, and some were considerably modified for new operators and uses. Among the most drastic conversions was the Spectrum SA-550, built by Spectrum Aircraft Corporation of Van Nuys, California, in the mid-1980s: Spectrum took the 336/337 airframe and removed the front engine, lengthened the nose to maintain the center of gravity, and replaced the rear piston engine with a pusher turboprop which offered more power than the combined pair of original petrol engines. The Spectrum SA-550 conversion also came together with an optional modernization package that prolonged the airframes’ service life, so that modified machines could well serve on for 20 years or more.

 

This drastic conversion was executed for both military and civil operators. The best-known military SA-550s were six former USAF O-2A airframes, which had been transferred to the U.S. Navy in 1983 for use as range controllers with VA-122 at NAS Lemoore, California. These aircraft were operationally nicknamed “Pelican”, due to the characteristic new nose shape, and the name unofficially caught on.

However, the SA-550 package was only adopted sporadically by private operators, but it became quite popular among several major police and fire departments. Typical duties for these machines included border/drug patrol, surveillance/observation duties (e.g. traffic, forest fire) and special tasks, including drug interdiction as well for SAR missions and undercover operations like narcotics and serialized criminal investigations. Some SA-550s were accordingly modified and individually outfitted with suitable sensors, including IR/low light cameras, searchlights, and internal auxiliary tanks. None were armed, even though some aircraft featured underwing hardpoints for external extra tanks, flare dispensers for nocturnal operations or smoke charge dispensers for ground target marking to guide water bombers to hidden forest fires.

 

The type’s versatility, low noise level, high travel speed and good loitering time in the operational area at low speed proved to be vital assets for these public service operators and justified its relatively high maintenance costs. A handful of the modernized Spectrum SA-550 machines were still in active service after the Millennium, primarily in the USA.

  

General characteristics:

Crew: 1 + 3 passengers (up to 5 passengers possible in special seat configuration)

Length: 32 ft 6½ in (9.94 m)

Wingspan: 38 ft ¾ in (11.62 m)

Height: 9 ft 2 in (2.79 m)

Wing area: 201 sq ft (18.81 m²)

Aspect ratio: 7.18:1

Airfoil: NACA 2412 at root, NACA 2409 at tip

Empty weight: 2,655 lb (1,204 kg)

Max takeoff weight: 4,400 lb (1,996 kg)

Fuel capacity: 92 US gal (77 imp gal; 350 l) normal,

128 US gal (107 imp gal; 480 l) with auxiliary tank

in the cabin instead of two passenger seats

 

Powerplant:

1× Pratt & Whitney PT6A-27 turboprop engine, delivering 550 shp (410 kW) and

driving a four-blade McCauley fully-feathering, constant-speed propeller, 6 ft 4 in (1.93 m) diameter

 

Performance:

Maximum speed: 199 mph (320 km/h, 173 kn) at sea level

Cruise speed: 144 mph (232 km/h, 125 kn) at 10,000 ft (3,000 m) (econ cruise)

Stall speed: 69 mph (111 km/h, 60 kn)

Range: 1421 mi (2.288 km, 1.243 nmi) at 10.000 ft (3.050 m) altitude and economy cruise

Service ceiling: 19,500 ft (5,900 m)

Rate of climb: 1,200 ft/min (6.1 m/s)

Takeoff distance to 50 ft (15m): 1,545 ft (471 m)

Landing distance from 50 ft (15m): 1,650 ft (500 m)

  

The kit and its assembly:

This build is the combination of ingredients that had already been stashed away for a long time, and the “Red Lights” Group Build at whatifmodellers.com in early 2021 was a good motivator and occasion to finally put everything together.

 

The basis is an ARII 1:72 Cessna T337 model kit – I had purchased it long ago with the expectation to create a military Skymaster from it, but I was confused by a fixed landing gear which would make it a 336? Well, without a further concrete plan the kit preliminarily landed in The Stash™…

However, the ARII model features the optional observation windows in the doors on the starboard side, in the form of a complete(!) fuselage half, so that it lends itself to a police or firefighter aircraft of some sort. This idea was furthermore fueled by a decal sheet that I had been given from a friend, left over from a 1:72 Italeri JetRanger, with three optional police helicopter markings.

The final creative element was the real-world “Pelican” conversion of six O-2As for the US Navy, as mentioned in the background above: the front engine was replaced with a longer nose and the engine configuration changed to a pusher-only aircraft with a single powerful turboprop engine. This looked so odd that I wanted to modify the ARII Cessna in a similar fashion, too, and all these factors came together in this model.

 

My Arii Cessna 337 kit is a re-boxing from 2009, but its origins date back to Eidai in 1972 and that’s just what you get: a vintage thing with some flash and sinkholes, raised (but fine) surface details and pretty crude seams with bulges and gaps. Some PSR is direly necessary, esp. the fit of the fuselage halves is cringeworthy. The clear parts were no source of joy, either; especially the windscreen turned out to be thick, very streaky (to a degree that I’d almost call it opaque!) and even not fully molded! The side glazing was also not very clear. I tried to improve the situation through polishing, but if the basis is already poor, there’s little you can do about it. Hrmpf.

 

However, the kit was built mostly OOB, including the extra O-2 glazing in the lower doors, but with some mods. One is a (barely visible) extra tank in the cabin’s rear, plus a pilot and an observer figure placed into the tight front seats. The extended “Pelican” nose was a lucky find – I was afraid that I had had to sculpt a nose from scratch with 2C putty. But I found a radome from a Hasegawa RA-5C, left over from a model I built in the Eighties and that has since long fallen apart. However, this nose fitted almost perfectly in size and shape, I just “blunted” the tip a little. Additionally, both the hull in front of the dashboard and the Vigilante radome were filled with as many lead beads as possible to keep the nose down.

 

The kit’s OOB spatted, fixed landing gear was retained – even though it is dubious for a Cessna 337, because this type had a fully retractable landing gear, and the model has the landing gear covers actually molded into the lower fuselage. On the other side, the Cessna 336’s fixed landing gear looks quite different, too! However, this is a what-if model, and a fixed landing gear might have been a measure to reduce maintenance costs?

 

The propeller was replaced with a resin four-blade aftermarket piece (from CMK, probably the best-fitting thing on this build!) on my standard metal axis/styrene tube adapter arrangement. The propeller belongs to a Shorts Tucano, but I think that it works well on the converted Cessna and its powerful pusher engine, even though in the real world, the SA-550 is AFAIK driven by a three-blade prop. For the different engine I also enlarged the dorsal air intake with a 1.5 mm piece of styrene sheet added on top of the molded original air scoop and added a pair of ventral exhaust stubs (scratched from sprue material).

Another addition is a pair of winglets, made from 0.5 mm styrene sheet – an upgrade which I found on several late Cessna 337s in various versions. They just add to the modernized look of the aircraft. For the intended observation role, a hemispherical fairing under the nose hides a 180° camera, and I added some antennae around the hull.

 

However, a final word concerning the model kit itself: nothing fits, be warned! While the kit is a simple affair and looks quite good in the box, assembling it turned out to be a nightmare, with flash, sinkholes, a brittle styrene and gaps everywhere. This includes the clear parts, which are pretty thick and blurry. The worst thing is the windscreen, which is not only EXTRA thick and EXTRA blurry, it was also not completely molded, with gaps on both sides. I tried to get it clearer through manual polishing, but the streaky blurs are integral – no hope for improvement unless you completely replace the parts! If I ever build a Cessna 337/O-2 again, I will give the Airfix kit a try, it can only be better…

  

Painting and markings:

The choice between the operator options from the JetRanger sheet was hard, it included Sweden and Italy, but I eventually settled for the LAPD because the livery looks cool and this police department not only operates helicopters, but also some fixed-wing aircraft.

 

I adapted the LAPD’s classic black-and-white police helicopter livery (Gloss White and Black, Humbrol 22 and 21, respectively) to the Cessna and extended it to the wings. At this point – already upset because of the poor fit of the hardware – disaster struck in the form of Humbrol’s 22 turning into a pinkish ivory upon curing! In the tin, the paint and its pigments looked pretty white and “clean”, and I assume that it’s the thinner that caused this change. What a crap! It’s probably the third tin with 22 that causes trouble, even though in different peculiarities!

The result was total rubbish, though, and I tried to rub the paint off as good as possible on the small model with its many windows, the fixed, delicate landing gear and the wing support struts. Then I overpainted the areas with Revell 301 (Semi-matt White). While this enamel yielded the intended pure white tone, the paint itself is rather gooey and not easy to work with, so that the overall finish turned out worse than desired. At least the black paint worked properly. The demarcations were created with black decal stripes (TL Modellbau), because the tiny model left little room for complex masking measures – and I did not risk any more painting accidents.

 

Since the aircraft would be kept shiny and clean, I just did a light black ink washing to emphasize surface details and did a light panel post-shading on the black areas, not for weathering but rather to accent surface structures. No further weathering was done (and necessary).

 

The markings/decals come – as mentioned above – from an Italeri 1:72 JetRanger, but they were augmented with some additional markings, e. g. grey walkways on the wings and “L-A-P-D” in large black letters under the wings, to distract from the poor finish of the white paint around them…

Finally, the kit was sealed overall with Italeri semi-gloss acrylic varnish, just with a matt anti-glare shield in front of the windscreen, which received thin white trim lines (generic decal stripes).

  

A challenging build due to the Arii kit’s rather poor basis, the massive rhinoplasty and the crisp paint scheme. However, I like the result – what-if models do not always have to be armed military vehicles, there’s potential in other genres, too. And this mono-engine “Pelican” Skymaster plays its role as a “flying eye” in police service credibly and well. However, this was my first and last Eidai kit…

+++ DISCLAIMER +++

Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based on historical facts. BEWARE!

  

Some background:

The Cessna Model 336 and 337 “Skymaster” were American twin-engine civil utility aircraft built in a unique push-pull configuration. Their engines were mounted in the nose and rear of its pod-style fuselage. Twin booms extended aft of the wings to the vertical stabilizers, with the rear engine between them. The horizontal stabilizer was aft of the pusher propeller, mounted between and connecting the two booms.

 

The first Skymaster, Model 336, had fixed landing gear and initially flew on February 28, 1961. It went into production in May 1963 with 195 being produced through mid-1964. In February 1965, Cessna introduced the larger Model 337 Super Skymaster with more powerful engines, retractable landing gear, and a dorsal air scoop for the rear engine (the "Super" prefix was subsequently dropped from the name). In 1966, the turbocharged T337 was introduced, and in 1973, the pressurized P337G entered production.

The type was very prolific and Cessna built 2.993 Skymasters of all variants, including 513 military O-2 (nicknamed "Oscar Deuce") versions from 1967 onwards. The latter featured underwing ordnance hard points to hold unguided rockets, gun pods or flares, and served in the forward air control (FAC) role and psychological operations (PSYOPS) by the US military between 1967 and 2010. Production in America ended in 1982, but was continued by Reims in France, with the FTB337 STOL and the military FTMA “Milirole”.

 

Both civil and military Cessna 336/337 version had long service careers, and some were considerably modified for new operators and uses. Among the most drastic conversions was the Spectrum SA-550, built by Spectrum Aircraft Corporation of Van Nuys, California, in the mid-1980s: Spectrum took the 336/337 airframe and removed the front engine, lengthened the nose to maintain the center of gravity, and replaced the rear piston engine with a pusher turboprop which offered more power than the combined pair of original petrol engines. The Spectrum SA-550 conversion also came together with an optional modernization package that prolonged the airframes’ service life, so that modified machines could well serve on for 20 years or more.

 

This drastic conversion was executed for both military and civil operators. The best-known military SA-550s were six former USAF O-2A airframes, which had been transferred to the U.S. Navy in 1983 for use as range controllers with VA-122 at NAS Lemoore, California. These aircraft were operationally nicknamed “Pelican”, due to the characteristic new nose shape, and the name unofficially caught on.

However, the SA-550 package was only adopted sporadically by private operators, but it became quite popular among several major police and fire departments. Typical duties for these machines included border/drug patrol, surveillance/observation duties (e.g. traffic, forest fire) and special tasks, including drug interdiction as well for SAR missions and undercover operations like narcotics and serialized criminal investigations. Some SA-550s were accordingly modified and individually outfitted with suitable sensors, including IR/low light cameras, searchlights, and internal auxiliary tanks. None were armed, even though some aircraft featured underwing hardpoints for external extra tanks, flare dispensers for nocturnal operations or smoke charge dispensers for ground target marking to guide water bombers to hidden forest fires.

 

The type’s versatility, low noise level, high travel speed and good loitering time in the operational area at low speed proved to be vital assets for these public service operators and justified its relatively high maintenance costs. A handful of the modernized Spectrum SA-550 machines were still in active service after the Millennium, primarily in the USA.

  

General characteristics:

Crew: 1 + 3 passengers (up to 5 passengers possible in special seat configuration)

Length: 32 ft 6½ in (9.94 m)

Wingspan: 38 ft ¾ in (11.62 m)

Height: 9 ft 2 in (2.79 m)

Wing area: 201 sq ft (18.81 m²)

Aspect ratio: 7.18:1

Airfoil: NACA 2412 at root, NACA 2409 at tip

Empty weight: 2,655 lb (1,204 kg)

Max takeoff weight: 4,400 lb (1,996 kg)

Fuel capacity: 92 US gal (77 imp gal; 350 l) normal,

128 US gal (107 imp gal; 480 l) with auxiliary tank

in the cabin instead of two passenger seats

 

Powerplant:

1× Pratt & Whitney PT6A-27 turboprop engine, delivering 550 shp (410 kW) and

driving a four-blade McCauley fully-feathering, constant-speed propeller, 6 ft 4 in (1.93 m) diameter

 

Performance:

Maximum speed: 199 mph (320 km/h, 173 kn) at sea level

Cruise speed: 144 mph (232 km/h, 125 kn) at 10,000 ft (3,000 m) (econ cruise)

Stall speed: 69 mph (111 km/h, 60 kn)

Range: 1421 mi (2.288 km, 1.243 nmi) at 10.000 ft (3.050 m) altitude and economy cruise

Service ceiling: 19,500 ft (5,900 m)

Rate of climb: 1,200 ft/min (6.1 m/s)

Takeoff distance to 50 ft (15m): 1,545 ft (471 m)

Landing distance from 50 ft (15m): 1,650 ft (500 m)

  

The kit and its assembly:

This build is the combination of ingredients that had already been stashed away for a long time, and the “Red Lights” Group Build at whatifmodellers.com in early 2021 was a good motivator and occasion to finally put everything together.

 

The basis is an ARII 1:72 Cessna T337 model kit – I had purchased it long ago with the expectation to create a military Skymaster from it, but I was confused by a fixed landing gear which would make it a 336? Well, without a further concrete plan the kit preliminarily landed in The Stash™…

However, the ARII model features the optional observation windows in the doors on the starboard side, in the form of a complete(!) fuselage half, so that it lends itself to a police or firefighter aircraft of some sort. This idea was furthermore fueled by a decal sheet that I had been given from a friend, left over from a 1:72 Italeri JetRanger, with three optional police helicopter markings.

The final creative element was the real-world “Pelican” conversion of six O-2As for the US Navy, as mentioned in the background above: the front engine was replaced with a longer nose and the engine configuration changed to a pusher-only aircraft with a single powerful turboprop engine. This looked so odd that I wanted to modify the ARII Cessna in a similar fashion, too, and all these factors came together in this model.

 

My Arii Cessna 337 kit is a re-boxing from 2009, but its origins date back to Eidai in 1972 and that’s just what you get: a vintage thing with some flash and sinkholes, raised (but fine) surface details and pretty crude seams with bulges and gaps. Some PSR is direly necessary, esp. the fit of the fuselage halves is cringeworthy. The clear parts were no source of joy, either; especially the windscreen turned out to be thick, very streaky (to a degree that I’d almost call it opaque!) and even not fully molded! The side glazing was also not very clear. I tried to improve the situation through polishing, but if the basis is already poor, there’s little you can do about it. Hrmpf.

 

However, the kit was built mostly OOB, including the extra O-2 glazing in the lower doors, but with some mods. One is a (barely visible) extra tank in the cabin’s rear, plus a pilot and an observer figure placed into the tight front seats. The extended “Pelican” nose was a lucky find – I was afraid that I had had to sculpt a nose from scratch with 2C putty. But I found a radome from a Hasegawa RA-5C, left over from a model I built in the Eighties and that has since long fallen apart. However, this nose fitted almost perfectly in size and shape, I just “blunted” the tip a little. Additionally, both the hull in front of the dashboard and the Vigilante radome were filled with as many lead beads as possible to keep the nose down.

 

The kit’s OOB spatted, fixed landing gear was retained – even though it is dubious for a Cessna 337, because this type had a fully retractable landing gear, and the model has the landing gear covers actually molded into the lower fuselage. On the other side, the Cessna 336’s fixed landing gear looks quite different, too! However, this is a what-if model, and a fixed landing gear might have been a measure to reduce maintenance costs?

 

The propeller was replaced with a resin four-blade aftermarket piece (from CMK, probably the best-fitting thing on this build!) on my standard metal axis/styrene tube adapter arrangement. The propeller belongs to a Shorts Tucano, but I think that it works well on the converted Cessna and its powerful pusher engine, even though in the real world, the SA-550 is AFAIK driven by a three-blade prop. For the different engine I also enlarged the dorsal air intake with a 1.5 mm piece of styrene sheet added on top of the molded original air scoop and added a pair of ventral exhaust stubs (scratched from sprue material).

Another addition is a pair of winglets, made from 0.5 mm styrene sheet – an upgrade which I found on several late Cessna 337s in various versions. They just add to the modernized look of the aircraft. For the intended observation role, a hemispherical fairing under the nose hides a 180° camera, and I added some antennae around the hull.

 

However, a final word concerning the model kit itself: nothing fits, be warned! While the kit is a simple affair and looks quite good in the box, assembling it turned out to be a nightmare, with flash, sinkholes, a brittle styrene and gaps everywhere. This includes the clear parts, which are pretty thick and blurry. The worst thing is the windscreen, which is not only EXTRA thick and EXTRA blurry, it was also not completely molded, with gaps on both sides. I tried to get it clearer through manual polishing, but the streaky blurs are integral – no hope for improvement unless you completely replace the parts! If I ever build a Cessna 337/O-2 again, I will give the Airfix kit a try, it can only be better…

  

Painting and markings:

The choice between the operator options from the JetRanger sheet was hard, it included Sweden and Italy, but I eventually settled for the LAPD because the livery looks cool and this police department not only operates helicopters, but also some fixed-wing aircraft.

 

I adapted the LAPD’s classic black-and-white police helicopter livery (Gloss White and Black, Humbrol 22 and 21, respectively) to the Cessna and extended it to the wings. At this point – already upset because of the poor fit of the hardware – disaster struck in the form of Humbrol’s 22 turning into a pinkish ivory upon curing! In the tin, the paint and its pigments looked pretty white and “clean”, and I assume that it’s the thinner that caused this change. What a crap! It’s probably the third tin with 22 that causes trouble, even though in different peculiarities!

The result was total rubbish, though, and I tried to rub the paint off as good as possible on the small model with its many windows, the fixed, delicate landing gear and the wing support struts. Then I overpainted the areas with Revell 301 (Semi-matt White). While this enamel yielded the intended pure white tone, the paint itself is rather gooey and not easy to work with, so that the overall finish turned out worse than desired. At least the black paint worked properly. The demarcations were created with black decal stripes (TL Modellbau), because the tiny model left little room for complex masking measures – and I did not risk any more painting accidents.

 

Since the aircraft would be kept shiny and clean, I just did a light black ink washing to emphasize surface details and did a light panel post-shading on the black areas, not for weathering but rather to accent surface structures. No further weathering was done (and necessary).

 

The markings/decals come – as mentioned above – from an Italeri 1:72 JetRanger, but they were augmented with some additional markings, e. g. grey walkways on the wings and “L-A-P-D” in large black letters under the wings, to distract from the poor finish of the white paint around them…

Finally, the kit was sealed overall with Italeri semi-gloss acrylic varnish, just with a matt anti-glare shield in front of the windscreen, which received thin white trim lines (generic decal stripes).

  

A challenging build due to the Arii kit’s rather poor basis, the massive rhinoplasty and the crisp paint scheme. However, I like the result – what-if models do not always have to be armed military vehicles, there’s potential in other genres, too. And this mono-engine “Pelican” Skymaster plays its role as a “flying eye” in police service credibly and well. However, this was my first and last Eidai kit…

+++ DISCLAIMER +++

Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based on historical facts. BEWARE!

  

Some background:

The Cessna Model 336 and 337 “Skymaster” were American twin-engine civil utility aircraft built in a unique push-pull configuration. Their engines were mounted in the nose and rear of its pod-style fuselage. Twin booms extended aft of the wings to the vertical stabilizers, with the rear engine between them. The horizontal stabilizer was aft of the pusher propeller, mounted between and connecting the two booms.

 

The first Skymaster, Model 336, had fixed landing gear and initially flew on February 28, 1961. It went into production in May 1963 with 195 being produced through mid-1964. In February 1965, Cessna introduced the larger Model 337 Super Skymaster with more powerful engines, retractable landing gear, and a dorsal air scoop for the rear engine (the "Super" prefix was subsequently dropped from the name). In 1966, the turbocharged T337 was introduced, and in 1973, the pressurized P337G entered production.

The type was very prolific and Cessna built 2.993 Skymasters of all variants, including 513 military O-2 (nicknamed "Oscar Deuce") versions from 1967 onwards. The latter featured underwing ordnance hard points to hold unguided rockets, gun pods or flares, and served in the forward air control (FAC) role and psychological operations (PSYOPS) by the US military between 1967 and 2010. Production in America ended in 1982, but was continued by Reims in France, with the FTB337 STOL and the military FTMA “Milirole”.

 

Both civil and military Cessna 336/337 version had long service careers, and some were considerably modified for new operators and uses. Among the most drastic conversions was the Spectrum SA-550, built by Spectrum Aircraft Corporation of Van Nuys, California, in the mid-1980s: Spectrum took the 336/337 airframe and removed the front engine, lengthened the nose to maintain the center of gravity, and replaced the rear piston engine with a pusher turboprop which offered more power than the combined pair of original petrol engines. The Spectrum SA-550 conversion also came together with an optional modernization package that prolonged the airframes’ service life, so that modified machines could well serve on for 20 years or more.

 

This drastic conversion was executed for both military and civil operators. The best-known military SA-550s were six former USAF O-2A airframes, which had been transferred to the U.S. Navy in 1983 for use as range controllers with VA-122 at NAS Lemoore, California. These aircraft were operationally nicknamed “Pelican”, due to the characteristic new nose shape, and the name unofficially caught on.

However, the SA-550 package was only adopted sporadically by private operators, but it became quite popular among several major police and fire departments. Typical duties for these machines included border/drug patrol, surveillance/observation duties (e.g. traffic, forest fire) and special tasks, including drug interdiction as well for SAR missions and undercover operations like narcotics and serialized criminal investigations. Some SA-550s were accordingly modified and individually outfitted with suitable sensors, including IR/low light cameras, searchlights, and internal auxiliary tanks. None were armed, even though some aircraft featured underwing hardpoints for external extra tanks, flare dispensers for nocturnal operations or smoke charge dispensers for ground target marking to guide water bombers to hidden forest fires.

 

The type’s versatility, low noise level, high travel speed and good loitering time in the operational area at low speed proved to be vital assets for these public service operators and justified its relatively high maintenance costs. A handful of the modernized Spectrum SA-550 machines were still in active service after the Millennium, primarily in the USA.

  

General characteristics:

Crew: 1 + 3 passengers (up to 5 passengers possible in special seat configuration)

Length: 32 ft 6½ in (9.94 m)

Wingspan: 38 ft ¾ in (11.62 m)

Height: 9 ft 2 in (2.79 m)

Wing area: 201 sq ft (18.81 m²)

Aspect ratio: 7.18:1

Airfoil: NACA 2412 at root, NACA 2409 at tip

Empty weight: 2,655 lb (1,204 kg)

Max takeoff weight: 4,400 lb (1,996 kg)

Fuel capacity: 92 US gal (77 imp gal; 350 l) normal,

128 US gal (107 imp gal; 480 l) with auxiliary tank

in the cabin instead of two passenger seats

 

Powerplant:

1× Pratt & Whitney PT6A-27 turboprop engine, delivering 550 shp (410 kW) and

driving a four-blade McCauley fully-feathering, constant-speed propeller, 6 ft 4 in (1.93 m) diameter

 

Performance:

Maximum speed: 199 mph (320 km/h, 173 kn) at sea level

Cruise speed: 144 mph (232 km/h, 125 kn) at 10,000 ft (3,000 m) (econ cruise)

Stall speed: 69 mph (111 km/h, 60 kn)

Range: 1421 mi (2.288 km, 1.243 nmi) at 10.000 ft (3.050 m) altitude and economy cruise

Service ceiling: 19,500 ft (5,900 m)

Rate of climb: 1,200 ft/min (6.1 m/s)

Takeoff distance to 50 ft (15m): 1,545 ft (471 m)

Landing distance from 50 ft (15m): 1,650 ft (500 m)

  

The kit and its assembly:

This build is the combination of ingredients that had already been stashed away for a long time, and the “Red Lights” Group Build at whatifmodellers.com in early 2021 was a good motivator and occasion to finally put everything together.

 

The basis is an ARII 1:72 Cessna T337 model kit – I had purchased it long ago with the expectation to create a military Skymaster from it, but I was confused by a fixed landing gear which would make it a 336? Well, without a further concrete plan the kit preliminarily landed in The Stash™…

However, the ARII model features the optional observation windows in the doors on the starboard side, in the form of a complete(!) fuselage half, so that it lends itself to a police or firefighter aircraft of some sort. This idea was furthermore fueled by a decal sheet that I had been given from a friend, left over from a 1:72 Italeri JetRanger, with three optional police helicopter markings.

The final creative element was the real-world “Pelican” conversion of six O-2As for the US Navy, as mentioned in the background above: the front engine was replaced with a longer nose and the engine configuration changed to a pusher-only aircraft with a single powerful turboprop engine. This looked so odd that I wanted to modify the ARII Cessna in a similar fashion, too, and all these factors came together in this model.

 

My Arii Cessna 337 kit is a re-boxing from 2009, but its origins date back to Eidai in 1972 and that’s just what you get: a vintage thing with some flash and sinkholes, raised (but fine) surface details and pretty crude seams with bulges and gaps. Some PSR is direly necessary, esp. the fit of the fuselage halves is cringeworthy. The clear parts were no source of joy, either; especially the windscreen turned out to be thick, very streaky (to a degree that I’d almost call it opaque!) and even not fully molded! The side glazing was also not very clear. I tried to improve the situation through polishing, but if the basis is already poor, there’s little you can do about it. Hrmpf.

 

However, the kit was built mostly OOB, including the extra O-2 glazing in the lower doors, but with some mods. One is a (barely visible) extra tank in the cabin’s rear, plus a pilot and an observer figure placed into the tight front seats. The extended “Pelican” nose was a lucky find – I was afraid that I had had to sculpt a nose from scratch with 2C putty. But I found a radome from a Hasegawa RA-5C, left over from a model I built in the Eighties and that has since long fallen apart. However, this nose fitted almost perfectly in size and shape, I just “blunted” the tip a little. Additionally, both the hull in front of the dashboard and the Vigilante radome were filled with as many lead beads as possible to keep the nose down.

 

The kit’s OOB spatted, fixed landing gear was retained – even though it is dubious for a Cessna 337, because this type had a fully retractable landing gear, and the model has the landing gear covers actually molded into the lower fuselage. On the other side, the Cessna 336’s fixed landing gear looks quite different, too! However, this is a what-if model, and a fixed landing gear might have been a measure to reduce maintenance costs?

 

The propeller was replaced with a resin four-blade aftermarket piece (from CMK, probably the best-fitting thing on this build!) on my standard metal axis/styrene tube adapter arrangement. The propeller belongs to a Shorts Tucano, but I think that it works well on the converted Cessna and its powerful pusher engine, even though in the real world, the SA-550 is AFAIK driven by a three-blade prop. For the different engine I also enlarged the dorsal air intake with a 1.5 mm piece of styrene sheet added on top of the molded original air scoop and added a pair of ventral exhaust stubs (scratched from sprue material).

Another addition is a pair of winglets, made from 0.5 mm styrene sheet – an upgrade which I found on several late Cessna 337s in various versions. They just add to the modernized look of the aircraft. For the intended observation role, a hemispherical fairing under the nose hides a 180° camera, and I added some antennae around the hull.

 

However, a final word concerning the model kit itself: nothing fits, be warned! While the kit is a simple affair and looks quite good in the box, assembling it turned out to be a nightmare, with flash, sinkholes, a brittle styrene and gaps everywhere. This includes the clear parts, which are pretty thick and blurry. The worst thing is the windscreen, which is not only EXTRA thick and EXTRA blurry, it was also not completely molded, with gaps on both sides. I tried to get it clearer through manual polishing, but the streaky blurs are integral – no hope for improvement unless you completely replace the parts! If I ever build a Cessna 337/O-2 again, I will give the Airfix kit a try, it can only be better…

  

Painting and markings:

The choice between the operator options from the JetRanger sheet was hard, it included Sweden and Italy, but I eventually settled for the LAPD because the livery looks cool and this police department not only operates helicopters, but also some fixed-wing aircraft.

 

I adapted the LAPD’s classic black-and-white police helicopter livery (Gloss White and Black, Humbrol 22 and 21, respectively) to the Cessna and extended it to the wings. At this point – already upset because of the poor fit of the hardware – disaster struck in the form of Humbrol’s 22 turning into a pinkish ivory upon curing! In the tin, the paint and its pigments looked pretty white and “clean”, and I assume that it’s the thinner that caused this change. What a crap! It’s probably the third tin with 22 that causes trouble, even though in different peculiarities!

The result was total rubbish, though, and I tried to rub the paint off as good as possible on the small model with its many windows, the fixed, delicate landing gear and the wing support struts. Then I overpainted the areas with Revell 301 (Semi-matt White). While this enamel yielded the intended pure white tone, the paint itself is rather gooey and not easy to work with, so that the overall finish turned out worse than desired. At least the black paint worked properly. The demarcations were created with black decal stripes (TL Modellbau), because the tiny model left little room for complex masking measures – and I did not risk any more painting accidents.

 

Since the aircraft would be kept shiny and clean, I just did a light black ink washing to emphasize surface details and did a light panel post-shading on the black areas, not for weathering but rather to accent surface structures. No further weathering was done (and necessary).

 

The markings/decals come – as mentioned above – from an Italeri 1:72 JetRanger, but they were augmented with some additional markings, e. g. grey walkways on the wings and “L-A-P-D” in large black letters under the wings, to distract from the poor finish of the white paint around them…

Finally, the kit was sealed overall with Italeri semi-gloss acrylic varnish, just with a matt anti-glare shield in front of the windscreen, which received thin white trim lines (generic decal stripes).

  

A challenging build due to the Arii kit’s rather poor basis, the massive rhinoplasty and the crisp paint scheme. However, I like the result – what-if models do not always have to be armed military vehicles, there’s potential in other genres, too. And this mono-engine “Pelican” Skymaster plays its role as a “flying eye” in police service credibly and well. However, this was my first and last Eidai kit…

+++ DISCLAIMER +++

Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based on historical facts. BEWARE!

  

Some background:

The Cessna Model 336 and 337 “Skymaster” were American twin-engine civil utility aircraft built in a unique push-pull configuration. Their engines were mounted in the nose and rear of its pod-style fuselage. Twin booms extended aft of the wings to the vertical stabilizers, with the rear engine between them. The horizontal stabilizer was aft of the pusher propeller, mounted between and connecting the two booms.

 

The first Skymaster, Model 336, had fixed landing gear and initially flew on February 28, 1961. It went into production in May 1963 with 195 being produced through mid-1964. In February 1965, Cessna introduced the larger Model 337 Super Skymaster with more powerful engines, retractable landing gear, and a dorsal air scoop for the rear engine (the "Super" prefix was subsequently dropped from the name). In 1966, the turbocharged T337 was introduced, and in 1973, the pressurized P337G entered production.

The type was very prolific and Cessna built 2.993 Skymasters of all variants, including 513 military O-2 (nicknamed "Oscar Deuce") versions from 1967 onwards. The latter featured underwing ordnance hard points to hold unguided rockets, gun pods or flares, and served in the forward air control (FAC) role and psychological operations (PSYOPS) by the US military between 1967 and 2010. Production in America ended in 1982, but was continued by Reims in France, with the FTB337 STOL and the military FTMA “Milirole”.

 

Both civil and military Cessna 336/337 version had long service careers, and some were considerably modified for new operators and uses. Among the most drastic conversions was the Spectrum SA-550, built by Spectrum Aircraft Corporation of Van Nuys, California, in the mid-1980s: Spectrum took the 336/337 airframe and removed the front engine, lengthened the nose to maintain the center of gravity, and replaced the rear piston engine with a pusher turboprop which offered more power than the combined pair of original petrol engines. The Spectrum SA-550 conversion also came together with an optional modernization package that prolonged the airframes’ service life, so that modified machines could well serve on for 20 years or more.

 

This drastic conversion was executed for both military and civil operators. The best-known military SA-550s were six former USAF O-2A airframes, which had been transferred to the U.S. Navy in 1983 for use as range controllers with VA-122 at NAS Lemoore, California. These aircraft were operationally nicknamed “Pelican”, due to the characteristic new nose shape, and the name unofficially caught on.

However, the SA-550 package was only adopted sporadically by private operators, but it became quite popular among several major police and fire departments. Typical duties for these machines included border/drug patrol, surveillance/observation duties (e.g. traffic, forest fire) and special tasks, including drug interdiction as well for SAR missions and undercover operations like narcotics and serialized criminal investigations. Some SA-550s were accordingly modified and individually outfitted with suitable sensors, including IR/low light cameras, searchlights, and internal auxiliary tanks. None were armed, even though some aircraft featured underwing hardpoints for external extra tanks, flare dispensers for nocturnal operations or smoke charge dispensers for ground target marking to guide water bombers to hidden forest fires.

 

The type’s versatility, low noise level, high travel speed and good loitering time in the operational area at low speed proved to be vital assets for these public service operators and justified its relatively high maintenance costs. A handful of the modernized Spectrum SA-550 machines were still in active service after the Millennium, primarily in the USA.

  

General characteristics:

Crew: 1 + 3 passengers (up to 5 passengers possible in special seat configuration)

Length: 32 ft 6½ in (9.94 m)

Wingspan: 38 ft ¾ in (11.62 m)

Height: 9 ft 2 in (2.79 m)

Wing area: 201 sq ft (18.81 m²)

Aspect ratio: 7.18:1

Airfoil: NACA 2412 at root, NACA 2409 at tip

Empty weight: 2,655 lb (1,204 kg)

Max takeoff weight: 4,400 lb (1,996 kg)

Fuel capacity: 92 US gal (77 imp gal; 350 l) normal,

128 US gal (107 imp gal; 480 l) with auxiliary tank

in the cabin instead of two passenger seats

 

Powerplant:

1× Pratt & Whitney PT6A-27 turboprop engine, delivering 550 shp (410 kW) and

driving a four-blade McCauley fully-feathering, constant-speed propeller, 6 ft 4 in (1.93 m) diameter

 

Performance:

Maximum speed: 199 mph (320 km/h, 173 kn) at sea level

Cruise speed: 144 mph (232 km/h, 125 kn) at 10,000 ft (3,000 m) (econ cruise)

Stall speed: 69 mph (111 km/h, 60 kn)

Range: 1421 mi (2.288 km, 1.243 nmi) at 10.000 ft (3.050 m) altitude and economy cruise

Service ceiling: 19,500 ft (5,900 m)

Rate of climb: 1,200 ft/min (6.1 m/s)

Takeoff distance to 50 ft (15m): 1,545 ft (471 m)

Landing distance from 50 ft (15m): 1,650 ft (500 m)

  

The kit and its assembly:

This build is the combination of ingredients that had already been stashed away for a long time, and the “Red Lights” Group Build at whatifmodellers.com in early 2021 was a good motivator and occasion to finally put everything together.

 

The basis is an ARII 1:72 Cessna T337 model kit – I had purchased it long ago with the expectation to create a military Skymaster from it, but I was confused by a fixed landing gear which would make it a 336? Well, without a further concrete plan the kit preliminarily landed in The Stash™…

However, the ARII model features the optional observation windows in the doors on the starboard side, in the form of a complete(!) fuselage half, so that it lends itself to a police or firefighter aircraft of some sort. This idea was furthermore fueled by a decal sheet that I had been given from a friend, left over from a 1:72 Italeri JetRanger, with three optional police helicopter markings.

The final creative element was the real-world “Pelican” conversion of six O-2As for the US Navy, as mentioned in the background above: the front engine was replaced with a longer nose and the engine configuration changed to a pusher-only aircraft with a single powerful turboprop engine. This looked so odd that I wanted to modify the ARII Cessna in a similar fashion, too, and all these factors came together in this model.

 

My Arii Cessna 337 kit is a re-boxing from 2009, but its origins date back to Eidai in 1972 and that’s just what you get: a vintage thing with some flash and sinkholes, raised (but fine) surface details and pretty crude seams with bulges and gaps. Some PSR is direly necessary, esp. the fit of the fuselage halves is cringeworthy. The clear parts were no source of joy, either; especially the windscreen turned out to be thick, very streaky (to a degree that I’d almost call it opaque!) and even not fully molded! The side glazing was also not very clear. I tried to improve the situation through polishing, but if the basis is already poor, there’s little you can do about it. Hrmpf.

 

However, the kit was built mostly OOB, including the extra O-2 glazing in the lower doors, but with some mods. One is a (barely visible) extra tank in the cabin’s rear, plus a pilot and an observer figure placed into the tight front seats. The extended “Pelican” nose was a lucky find – I was afraid that I had had to sculpt a nose from scratch with 2C putty. But I found a radome from a Hasegawa RA-5C, left over from a model I built in the Eighties and that has since long fallen apart. However, this nose fitted almost perfectly in size and shape, I just “blunted” the tip a little. Additionally, both the hull in front of the dashboard and the Vigilante radome were filled with as many lead beads as possible to keep the nose down.

 

The kit’s OOB spatted, fixed landing gear was retained – even though it is dubious for a Cessna 337, because this type had a fully retractable landing gear, and the model has the landing gear covers actually molded into the lower fuselage. On the other side, the Cessna 336’s fixed landing gear looks quite different, too! However, this is a what-if model, and a fixed landing gear might have been a measure to reduce maintenance costs?

 

The propeller was replaced with a resin four-blade aftermarket piece (from CMK, probably the best-fitting thing on this build!) on my standard metal axis/styrene tube adapter arrangement. The propeller belongs to a Shorts Tucano, but I think that it works well on the converted Cessna and its powerful pusher engine, even though in the real world, the SA-550 is AFAIK driven by a three-blade prop. For the different engine I also enlarged the dorsal air intake with a 1.5 mm piece of styrene sheet added on top of the molded original air scoop and added a pair of ventral exhaust stubs (scratched from sprue material).

Another addition is a pair of winglets, made from 0.5 mm styrene sheet – an upgrade which I found on several late Cessna 337s in various versions. They just add to the modernized look of the aircraft. For the intended observation role, a hemispherical fairing under the nose hides a 180° camera, and I added some antennae around the hull.

 

However, a final word concerning the model kit itself: nothing fits, be warned! While the kit is a simple affair and looks quite good in the box, assembling it turned out to be a nightmare, with flash, sinkholes, a brittle styrene and gaps everywhere. This includes the clear parts, which are pretty thick and blurry. The worst thing is the windscreen, which is not only EXTRA thick and EXTRA blurry, it was also not completely molded, with gaps on both sides. I tried to get it clearer through manual polishing, but the streaky blurs are integral – no hope for improvement unless you completely replace the parts! If I ever build a Cessna 337/O-2 again, I will give the Airfix kit a try, it can only be better…

  

Painting and markings:

The choice between the operator options from the JetRanger sheet was hard, it included Sweden and Italy, but I eventually settled for the LAPD because the livery looks cool and this police department not only operates helicopters, but also some fixed-wing aircraft.

 

I adapted the LAPD’s classic black-and-white police helicopter livery (Gloss White and Black, Humbrol 22 and 21, respectively) to the Cessna and extended it to the wings. At this point – already upset because of the poor fit of the hardware – disaster struck in the form of Humbrol’s 22 turning into a pinkish ivory upon curing! In the tin, the paint and its pigments looked pretty white and “clean”, and I assume that it’s the thinner that caused this change. What a crap! It’s probably the third tin with 22 that causes trouble, even though in different peculiarities!

The result was total rubbish, though, and I tried to rub the paint off as good as possible on the small model with its many windows, the fixed, delicate landing gear and the wing support struts. Then I overpainted the areas with Revell 301 (Semi-matt White). While this enamel yielded the intended pure white tone, the paint itself is rather gooey and not easy to work with, so that the overall finish turned out worse than desired. At least the black paint worked properly. The demarcations were created with black decal stripes (TL Modellbau), because the tiny model left little room for complex masking measures – and I did not risk any more painting accidents.

 

Since the aircraft would be kept shiny and clean, I just did a light black ink washing to emphasize surface details and did a light panel post-shading on the black areas, not for weathering but rather to accent surface structures. No further weathering was done (and necessary).

 

The markings/decals come – as mentioned above – from an Italeri 1:72 JetRanger, but they were augmented with some additional markings, e. g. grey walkways on the wings and “L-A-P-D” in large black letters under the wings, to distract from the poor finish of the white paint around them…

Finally, the kit was sealed overall with Italeri semi-gloss acrylic varnish, just with a matt anti-glare shield in front of the windscreen, which received thin white trim lines (generic decal stripes).

  

A challenging build due to the Arii kit’s rather poor basis, the massive rhinoplasty and the crisp paint scheme. However, I like the result – what-if models do not always have to be armed military vehicles, there’s potential in other genres, too. And this mono-engine “Pelican” Skymaster plays its role as a “flying eye” in police service credibly and well. However, this was my first and last Eidai kit…

+++ DISCLAIMER +++

Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based on historical facts. BEWARE!

  

Some background:

The Cessna Model 336 and 337 “Skymaster” were American twin-engine civil utility aircraft built in a unique push-pull configuration. Their engines were mounted in the nose and rear of its pod-style fuselage. Twin booms extended aft of the wings to the vertical stabilizers, with the rear engine between them. The horizontal stabilizer was aft of the pusher propeller, mounted between and connecting the two booms.

 

The first Skymaster, Model 336, had fixed landing gear and initially flew on February 28, 1961. It went into production in May 1963 with 195 being produced through mid-1964. In February 1965, Cessna introduced the larger Model 337 Super Skymaster with more powerful engines, retractable landing gear, and a dorsal air scoop for the rear engine (the "Super" prefix was subsequently dropped from the name). In 1966, the turbocharged T337 was introduced, and in 1973, the pressurized P337G entered production.

The type was very prolific and Cessna built 2.993 Skymasters of all variants, including 513 military O-2 (nicknamed "Oscar Deuce") versions from 1967 onwards. The latter featured underwing ordnance hard points to hold unguided rockets, gun pods or flares, and served in the forward air control (FAC) role and psychological operations (PSYOPS) by the US military between 1967 and 2010. Production in America ended in 1982, but was continued by Reims in France, with the FTB337 STOL and the military FTMA “Milirole”.

 

Both civil and military Cessna 336/337 version had long service careers, and some were considerably modified for new operators and uses. Among the most drastic conversions was the Spectrum SA-550, built by Spectrum Aircraft Corporation of Van Nuys, California, in the mid-1980s: Spectrum took the 336/337 airframe and removed the front engine, lengthened the nose to maintain the center of gravity, and replaced the rear piston engine with a pusher turboprop which offered more power than the combined pair of original petrol engines. The Spectrum SA-550 conversion also came together with an optional modernization package that prolonged the airframes’ service life, so that modified machines could well serve on for 20 years or more.

 

This drastic conversion was executed for both military and civil operators. The best-known military SA-550s were six former USAF O-2A airframes, which had been transferred to the U.S. Navy in 1983 for use as range controllers with VA-122 at NAS Lemoore, California. These aircraft were operationally nicknamed “Pelican”, due to the characteristic new nose shape, and the name unofficially caught on.

However, the SA-550 package was only adopted sporadically by private operators, but it became quite popular among several major police and fire departments. Typical duties for these machines included border/drug patrol, surveillance/observation duties (e.g. traffic, forest fire) and special tasks, including drug interdiction as well for SAR missions and undercover operations like narcotics and serialized criminal investigations. Some SA-550s were accordingly modified and individually outfitted with suitable sensors, including IR/low light cameras, searchlights, and internal auxiliary tanks. None were armed, even though some aircraft featured underwing hardpoints for external extra tanks, flare dispensers for nocturnal operations or smoke charge dispensers for ground target marking to guide water bombers to hidden forest fires.

 

The type’s versatility, low noise level, high travel speed and good loitering time in the operational area at low speed proved to be vital assets for these public service operators and justified its relatively high maintenance costs. A handful of the modernized Spectrum SA-550 machines were still in active service after the Millennium, primarily in the USA.

  

General characteristics:

Crew: 1 + 3 passengers (up to 5 passengers possible in special seat configuration)

Length: 32 ft 6½ in (9.94 m)

Wingspan: 38 ft ¾ in (11.62 m)

Height: 9 ft 2 in (2.79 m)

Wing area: 201 sq ft (18.81 m²)

Aspect ratio: 7.18:1

Airfoil: NACA 2412 at root, NACA 2409 at tip

Empty weight: 2,655 lb (1,204 kg)

Max takeoff weight: 4,400 lb (1,996 kg)

Fuel capacity: 92 US gal (77 imp gal; 350 l) normal,

128 US gal (107 imp gal; 480 l) with auxiliary tank

in the cabin instead of two passenger seats

 

Powerplant:

1× Pratt & Whitney PT6A-27 turboprop engine, delivering 550 shp (410 kW) and

driving a four-blade McCauley fully-feathering, constant-speed propeller, 6 ft 4 in (1.93 m) diameter

 

Performance:

Maximum speed: 199 mph (320 km/h, 173 kn) at sea level

Cruise speed: 144 mph (232 km/h, 125 kn) at 10,000 ft (3,000 m) (econ cruise)

Stall speed: 69 mph (111 km/h, 60 kn)

Range: 1421 mi (2.288 km, 1.243 nmi) at 10.000 ft (3.050 m) altitude and economy cruise

Service ceiling: 19,500 ft (5,900 m)

Rate of climb: 1,200 ft/min (6.1 m/s)

Takeoff distance to 50 ft (15m): 1,545 ft (471 m)

Landing distance from 50 ft (15m): 1,650 ft (500 m)

  

The kit and its assembly:

This build is the combination of ingredients that had already been stashed away for a long time, and the “Red Lights” Group Build at whatifmodellers.com in early 2021 was a good motivator and occasion to finally put everything together.

 

The basis is an ARII 1:72 Cessna T337 model kit – I had purchased it long ago with the expectation to create a military Skymaster from it, but I was confused by a fixed landing gear which would make it a 336? Well, without a further concrete plan the kit preliminarily landed in The Stash™…

However, the ARII model features the optional observation windows in the doors on the starboard side, in the form of a complete(!) fuselage half, so that it lends itself to a police or firefighter aircraft of some sort. This idea was furthermore fueled by a decal sheet that I had been given from a friend, left over from a 1:72 Italeri JetRanger, with three optional police helicopter markings.

The final creative element was the real-world “Pelican” conversion of six O-2As for the US Navy, as mentioned in the background above: the front engine was replaced with a longer nose and the engine configuration changed to a pusher-only aircraft with a single powerful turboprop engine. This looked so odd that I wanted to modify the ARII Cessna in a similar fashion, too, and all these factors came together in this model.

 

My Arii Cessna 337 kit is a re-boxing from 2009, but its origins date back to Eidai in 1972 and that’s just what you get: a vintage thing with some flash and sinkholes, raised (but fine) surface details and pretty crude seams with bulges and gaps. Some PSR is direly necessary, esp. the fit of the fuselage halves is cringeworthy. The clear parts were no source of joy, either; especially the windscreen turned out to be thick, very streaky (to a degree that I’d almost call it opaque!) and even not fully molded! The side glazing was also not very clear. I tried to improve the situation through polishing, but if the basis is already poor, there’s little you can do about it. Hrmpf.

 

However, the kit was built mostly OOB, including the extra O-2 glazing in the lower doors, but with some mods. One is a (barely visible) extra tank in the cabin’s rear, plus a pilot and an observer figure placed into the tight front seats. The extended “Pelican” nose was a lucky find – I was afraid that I had had to sculpt a nose from scratch with 2C putty. But I found a radome from a Hasegawa RA-5C, left over from a model I built in the Eighties and that has since long fallen apart. However, this nose fitted almost perfectly in size and shape, I just “blunted” the tip a little. Additionally, both the hull in front of the dashboard and the Vigilante radome were filled with as many lead beads as possible to keep the nose down.

 

The kit’s OOB spatted, fixed landing gear was retained – even though it is dubious for a Cessna 337, because this type had a fully retractable landing gear, and the model has the landing gear covers actually molded into the lower fuselage. On the other side, the Cessna 336’s fixed landing gear looks quite different, too! However, this is a what-if model, and a fixed landing gear might have been a measure to reduce maintenance costs?

 

The propeller was replaced with a resin four-blade aftermarket piece (from CMK, probably the best-fitting thing on this build!) on my standard metal axis/styrene tube adapter arrangement. The propeller belongs to a Shorts Tucano, but I think that it works well on the converted Cessna and its powerful pusher engine, even though in the real world, the SA-550 is AFAIK driven by a three-blade prop. For the different engine I also enlarged the dorsal air intake with a 1.5 mm piece of styrene sheet added on top of the molded original air scoop and added a pair of ventral exhaust stubs (scratched from sprue material).

Another addition is a pair of winglets, made from 0.5 mm styrene sheet – an upgrade which I found on several late Cessna 337s in various versions. They just add to the modernized look of the aircraft. For the intended observation role, a hemispherical fairing under the nose hides a 180° camera, and I added some antennae around the hull.

 

However, a final word concerning the model kit itself: nothing fits, be warned! While the kit is a simple affair and looks quite good in the box, assembling it turned out to be a nightmare, with flash, sinkholes, a brittle styrene and gaps everywhere. This includes the clear parts, which are pretty thick and blurry. The worst thing is the windscreen, which is not only EXTRA thick and EXTRA blurry, it was also not completely molded, with gaps on both sides. I tried to get it clearer through manual polishing, but the streaky blurs are integral – no hope for improvement unless you completely replace the parts! If I ever build a Cessna 337/O-2 again, I will give the Airfix kit a try, it can only be better…

  

Painting and markings:

The choice between the operator options from the JetRanger sheet was hard, it included Sweden and Italy, but I eventually settled for the LAPD because the livery looks cool and this police department not only operates helicopters, but also some fixed-wing aircraft.

 

I adapted the LAPD’s classic black-and-white police helicopter livery (Gloss White and Black, Humbrol 22 and 21, respectively) to the Cessna and extended it to the wings. At this point – already upset because of the poor fit of the hardware – disaster struck in the form of Humbrol’s 22 turning into a pinkish ivory upon curing! In the tin, the paint and its pigments looked pretty white and “clean”, and I assume that it’s the thinner that caused this change. What a crap! It’s probably the third tin with 22 that causes trouble, even though in different peculiarities!

The result was total rubbish, though, and I tried to rub the paint off as good as possible on the small model with its many windows, the fixed, delicate landing gear and the wing support struts. Then I overpainted the areas with Revell 301 (Semi-matt White). While this enamel yielded the intended pure white tone, the paint itself is rather gooey and not easy to work with, so that the overall finish turned out worse than desired. At least the black paint worked properly. The demarcations were created with black decal stripes (TL Modellbau), because the tiny model left little room for complex masking measures – and I did not risk any more painting accidents.

 

Since the aircraft would be kept shiny and clean, I just did a light black ink washing to emphasize surface details and did a light panel post-shading on the black areas, not for weathering but rather to accent surface structures. No further weathering was done (and necessary).

 

The markings/decals come – as mentioned above – from an Italeri 1:72 JetRanger, but they were augmented with some additional markings, e. g. grey walkways on the wings and “L-A-P-D” in large black letters under the wings, to distract from the poor finish of the white paint around them…

Finally, the kit was sealed overall with Italeri semi-gloss acrylic varnish, just with a matt anti-glare shield in front of the windscreen, which received thin white trim lines (generic decal stripes).

  

A challenging build due to the Arii kit’s rather poor basis, the massive rhinoplasty and the crisp paint scheme. However, I like the result – what-if models do not always have to be armed military vehicles, there’s potential in other genres, too. And this mono-engine “Pelican” Skymaster plays its role as a “flying eye” in police service credibly and well. However, this was my first and last Eidai kit…

Cessna O-2A Skymaster.

 

Intro:

The Cessna O-2 Skymaster (nicknamed "Oscar Deuce") is a military version of the Cessna 337 Super Skymaster, used for forward air control (FAC) and psychological operations (PSYOPS) by the US military between 1967 and 2010.

  

About this creation:

I have a weak spot for odd looking aircrafts, so the Cessna 337 Skymaster with its push-pull engine configuration and twin tail-booms, has always had my interest as a model subject. I wanted it to fit my other range of aircrafts so it`s build to 1:40 scale. Major challenges for this model was: the main-wing shape and the propeller. The main wing shape is done by use of hinges inside the wing. Most of the wedge gap is covered by 1x2 tiles. I found no suitable 2 blade propeller, 7 stud dia. , in LEGOs range of propellers. For my civil Cessna 337 Super Skymaster, I made a brick-built one, just to see if it was possible, and I`m actually quite pleased with the result. For this one I have modified a 9 stud dia. two blade propeller into a 7 stud diameter. I`ve added a self-adhesive printed template onto each propeller blade and sanded off the excessive area. With this modified propeller I was also able to add a spinner.

  

About the Skymaster:

 

Crew: 1/2

 

Powerplant: two 157kw (210hp) Continental IO-360-GB flat-six piston engines.

 

Performance: max speed 336 km/h (206mph); range 2288km (1422 miles); service ceiling 5485m (18.000ft)

 

Dimensions: wingspan 11.63m (38ft 2in); length 9.07m (29ft 9in); height 2.79m (9ft 2in)

 

Weight: 2100kg (4630lb) maximum take-off weight

 

Source: The Encyclopedia of Aircraft

 

More informations about the Cessna O-2A Skymaster at Wikipedia.

 

More pictures on my Flickr

Hope you enjoy the pictures.

Vietnam 68'-69' /Christopher Harlow collection/.

The media do not relay the truth -- factual accounts of what happened -- they spin events to further an objective. Sources went so far as to omit the exclamation mark in favor of a period, implying that he wasn't yelling, as if he was calm and speaking in a natural tone. PSYOP is all around. PSYOP is everywhere.

Cessna O-2A Skymaster.

 

Intro:

The Cessna O-2 Skymaster (nicknamed "Oscar Deuce") is a military version of the Cessna 337 Super Skymaster, used for forward air control (FAC) and psychological operations (PSYOPS) by the US military between 1967 and 2010.

  

About this creation:

I have a weak spot for odd looking aircrafts, so the Cessna 337 Skymaster with its push-pull engine configuration and twin tail-booms, has always had my interest as a model subject. I wanted it to fit my other range of aircrafts so it`s build to 1:40 scale. Major challenges for this model was: the main-wing shape and the propeller. The main wing shape is done by use of hinges inside the wing. Most of the wedge gap is covered by 1x2 tiles. I found no suitable 2 blade propeller, 7 stud dia. , in LEGOs range of propellers. For my civil Cessna 337 Super Skymaster, I made a brick-built one, just to see if it was possible, and I`m actually quite pleased with the result. For this one I have modified a 9 stud dia. two blade propeller into a 7 stud diameter. I`ve added a self-adhesive printed template onto each propeller blade and sanded off the excessive area. With this modified propeller I was also able to add a spinner.

  

About the Skymaster:

 

Crew: 1/2

 

Powerplant: two 157kw (210hp) Continental IO-360-GB flat-six piston engines.

 

Performance: max speed 336 km/h (206mph); range 2288km (1422 miles); service ceiling 5485m (18.000ft)

 

Dimensions: wingspan 11.63m (38ft 2in); length 9.07m (29ft 9in); height 2.79m (9ft 2in)

 

Weight: 2100kg (4630lb) maximum take-off weight

 

Source: The Encyclopedia of Aircraft

 

More informations about the Cessna O-2A Skymaster at Wikipedia.

 

More pictures on my Flickr

Hope you enjoy the pictures.

- July 31 2006 : The 911 Truth movement held a www.americanscholarssymposium.org/ symposium in Los Angeles on June 25, 2006. This taping is now airing (it's July 29 2006) on CSPAN many times over. I must say it was something to see on mainstream media. It's about time, better late than not at all.

 

****You can see it here online: video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5004704309041471296&...

  

This info. about the "Loose Change" video added to this post on 5-13-06.

 

"LOOSE CHANGE" 2nd EDITION

This video will probably be the next Farenheight 911 only this is the real thing and it gets down

to the irrefutable meat and potatoes of the Bush admin.'s 911 coverup and complicity in the attacks.

www.loosechange911.com/

 

IF YOU WATCH THIS VIDEO IT WILL MOST LIKELY CHANGE EVERYTHING YOU BELIEVE ABOUT 911: video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8260059923762628848&...

 

__________________________________________________

 

This is a photo of an electronic billboard taken on July 14, 2005.

 

Today on October 3, 2005 I found out from Lamar Advertising of Baton Rouge, that a "Private" donation (an individual) from Rural Louisiana Funded this series of Bush Advertisements.

 

This electronic billboard ad was along interstate I-10 in a spot where traffic backs up for hours every day in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Never seen anything like it in the US. This is another devious example of how Bush has used the 911 incident to manipulate the American people. And the worst part is that the Bush administration (after everything else they have lied about) has without question lied to the world about the truth regarding the 911 attacks.

 

Given that the Bush administration has now been found to be "Buying News" illegally, is this form of advertising acceptable? The Bush administration could design an ad and get anyone to pay for it and we would never know the difference. Just like Payola in the music industry. Would it be okay to put up abortion ad's paid for by the HMO's for example?

  

Buying of News by Bush's Aides Is Ruled Illegal

 

By ROBERT PEAR

Published: October 1, 2005

 

WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 - Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush's education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.

 

In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated "covert propaganda" in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.

www.nytimes.com/2005/10/01/politics/01educ.html

 

We have to override the Bush Media Machine and expose the truth about this criminal administration. The things they have done and are doing are unprecedented. Don’t believe ANYTHING you SEE or HEAR no matter what the medium. This is how we got in this position.

  

WAKE UP AMERICA!

 

What's it gonna take?

The Bush administration has not told the truth about 911.

They are lying. How could they do that you ask? They did it with a war! How? With advertising, lying, buying media, fixing elections, fraud, payola...

  

Pentagon Bars Military Officers And Analysts From Testifying

 

September 21, 2005, Wednesday

By PHILIP SHENON (NYT); National Desk

Late Edition - Final, Section A, Page 15, Column 5, 477 words

select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70F1EF93D540C72...

 

Republicans See Signs That Pentagon Is Evading Oversight

 

By DOUGLAS JEHL

Published: September 29, 2005

Correction Appended

www.nytimes.com/2005/09/29/politics/29intel.html

  

QUESTION: Think about this carefully. Do you really think Jet Fuel could bring down the World Trade Center Buildings? And Building 7 one block away?

Why were the Huge STEEL pylons burrowed deep into the earth’s bedrock on fire & Smoking for weeks? How could jet fuel possibly do that? Especially when the Jet fuel would be incinerated immediately in the explosion?

Look at this: www.whatreallyhappened.com/wtc7.html

 

Larry Silverstein, WTC 7, and the 9/11 Demolition

www.whatreallyhappened.com/cutter.html

 

bgtruth.d2gwebsite.com/uploads/CZGDn6KVKqs18ghZOW4-dQ/yoE...

PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT BUSH SAYS IN THE END of the Clip!

  

We have access to unprecedented amounts of information.

Let it not obscure the truth.

 

IMPEACH GEORGE W. BUSH

   

*************************

READ THIS on MY BLOG:

 

Thursday, August 18, 2005

 

Bush continues to use "State Secrets Privilege" to Block Inquiries into Treasonous Behavior regarding 911 & Nuclear Weapons Trading

 

antifluffsuperstar.blogspot.com/

*************************

  

- Bunnatine Greenhouse

 

This is no doubt a great and courageous woman. She is laying down her life and future to expose Dick Cheney for his Halliburton No Bid Contracts (52%) involved with the illegal justification of murder in Iraq.

 

Army Whistleblower Draws Fire After Questioning Deals

'Bunny' Greenhouse Asks Why No One Competes Against Halliburton, Other Contractors

By DEBORAH HASTINGS, AP

 

WASHINGTON (Aug. 7) - In the world as Bunnatine Greenhouse sees it, people do the right thing. They stand up for the greater good and they speak up when things go wrong. She believes God has a purpose for each life and she prays every day for that purpose to be made evident. These days she is praying her heart out, because she is in a great deal of trouble. www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/articles/050307roco02

 

*****************************************************

  

Below are links for those who want to investigate for themselves. Don’t take my word for it and for God’s Sake Don’t Take Bush’s word for it:

 

DECIDE FOR YOURSELF

 

BOHEMIAN GROVE EXPOSED! BUSH=OCCULT or JESUS?

 

*** Watch David Gergen former Clinton Adviser talk about Bohemian Grove:

www.infowars.com/video/previews/martial_law/wm_bb.htm

www.infowars.com/video/previews/martial_law/qt_bb.htm

 

CHECK THIS OUT: (REAL PLAYER CLIP)

www.infowars.com/Video/BG/BG_Trailer_fast.ram

www.infowars.com/bg1.html

 

Occult Activities at the Elite Bohemian Grove in Northern California Exposed!

www.propagandamatrix.com/archivebohemiangrove.html

 

-More on Bohemian Grove: www.rotten.com/library/conspiracy/bohemian-grove/

www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-us&q=b...

www.sonomacountyfreepress.com/bohos/bohofact.html

 

Some of the most powerful people in the US government attend occult worship events every July at "Bohemian Grove". Is that funny? Do you think it's true? Decide for yourself. Movies of it exist. Hit the links.

  

-See George W. Bush, “Christian”- "God told me I was going to be president..." flip the BIRD on Video.

www.infowars.com/video/previews/martial_law/wm_56.htm

www.infowars.com/video/previews/martial_law/qt_256.htm

 

****Watch these two videos below:

 

- “Video Clip from Loose Change”: bgtruth.d2gwebsite.com/uploads/CZGDn6KVKqs18ghZOW4-dQ/yoE...

**Pay ATTENTION to what BUSH SAYS at the END of THIS CLIP!**

  

- “Video of 911 Truth”: 67.32.161.240/uploads/CZGDn6KVKqs18ghZOW4-dQ/14aRXW_v8lCj...

This one is Long but it's a very important video to watch to get the whole picture. It's worth it.

 

-This Blog is dedicated to 911 Truth:

bgtruth.blogspot.com/

 

bgtruth.blogspot.com/2005_07_01_bgtruth_archive.html

bgtruth.blogspot.com/2004_07_01_bgtruth_archive.html

  

Reopen911.org: reopen911.org/

 

www.podcast.net/show/51580

 

www.media-criticism.com/911_Theory_10_2003.html

www.jimmywalter.com/

  

-911 The Road to Tyrany: tvnewslies.org/html/911-_the_road_to_tyranny_dvd.html

 

-911 Video Page: tvnewslies.org/html/covering_up.html

   

THE MILITARY CAPITALIZATION CORPORATION OF AMERICA:

 

- Carlyle Group/Bush Sr. www.hereinreality.com/carlyle.html

“Carlyle Group Exposed Video”: www.indybay.org/news/2004/04/1678405.php

 

Larry Silverstein, WTC 7, and the 9/11 Demolition

www.whatreallyhappened.com/cutter.html

 

-Oil/Halliburton/Cheny/PNAC... Mere Coincidence?

“The study estimates that Halliburton has received roughly 52 percent of the $25.4 billion that the Pentagon has paid out to so far to 77 private contractors in Iraq.”

www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=12476

www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2005/06/22/...

www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2003/07/we_455_01.html

www.halliburtonwatch.org/

   

HERE IS A BUNCH OF OTHER INFORMATION:

  

Bombs in the Building: World Trade Center 'Conspiracy Theory' is a Conspiracy Fact

(READ THIS!!!)

www.prisonplanet.com/analysis_lavello_050503_bombs.html

  

YOUR PAPERS, PLEASE …

Florida under martial law?

Rumors persist despite official denial from Jeb Bush administration.

www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=25051

  

Hijack 'suspects' alive and well

BBC News

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1559151.stm#

  

THE LIE OF THE CENTURY

www.whatreallyhappened.com/lieofthecentury.html

  

THE HISTORY OF PEARL HARBOR

THE BONES OF "STATION H"

whatreallyhappened.com/SH.html

  

Occult Activities at the Elite Bohemian Grove in Northern California Exposed!

www.propagandamatrix.com/archivebohemiangrove.html

  

What causes Gulf War Illness?

(a.k.a. Gulf War Syndrome; Persian Gulf Illness)

beyondtreason.com/

  

Rove: out of White House, into jail?

 

www.pww.org/article/articleprint/7413/

  

White House Silenced Experts Who Questioned Iraq Intel Six Months Before War

by Jason Leopold

June 12, 2003

 

John Dean, the former counsel to President Richard Nixon, wrote in a column this week that if President Bush mislead the public in building a case for war in Iraq, a case for impeachment could be made.

 

"Presidential statements, particularly on matters of national security, are held to an expectation of the highest standard of truthfulness," Dean wrote this week. "A president cannot stretch, twist or distort facts and get away with it. President Lyndon Johnson's distortions of the truth about Vietnam forced him to stand down from reelection. President Richard Nixon's false statements about Watergate forced his resignation."

  

www.BushCrank.com

  

OTHER BUSH PICTURE POSTS WITH DOCUMENTATION:

  

Desperately Seeking Jesus:

www.flickr.com/photos/antifluff/26013360/

 

Authoritarianism and ideology

www.flickr.com/photos/antifluff/25408362/

  

World War II veteran, Sgt. Maj. Raymond Sylvester, regales paratroopers from the U.S. Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command at the American cemetery in Normandy, France, June 6, 2011. These paratroopers are members of Task Force Normandy, which is a multinational force of U.S., U.K., French, and German soldiers, sailors, and airmen in a combined effort to remember and celebrate the 67th Anniversary of the D-Day operations.

U.S. Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command (Airborne)

Photo by Staff Sgt. Felix Fimbres

Date Taken:06.06.2011

Location:UTAH BEACH, 1, FR

Related Photos: dvidshub.net/r/vu4gnz

Paratroopers line the street before the sun rises, waiting to donate their toys in hopes of receiving a winning lottery ticket for the opportunity to earn foreign jump wings at the 17th Annual Randy Oler Memorial Operation Toy Drop. The airborne operation is hosted by the U.S. Army Civil Affairs & Psychological Operations Command (Airborne), a U.S. Army Reserve operational command, Dec. 5, 2014 at Pope Field, North Carolina. Operation Toy Drop is the world’s largest combined airborne operation with seven allied partner nation paratroopers participating and allows Soldiers the opportunity to help children in need everywhere receive toys for the holidays. (U.S. Army photo by Timothy L. Hale/Released)

+++ DISCLAIMER +++

Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based on historical facts. BEWARE!

  

Some background:

The Cessna Model 336 and 337 “Skymaster” were American twin-engine civil utility aircraft built in a unique push-pull configuration. Their engines were mounted in the nose and rear of its pod-style fuselage. Twin booms extended aft of the wings to the vertical stabilizers, with the rear engine between them. The horizontal stabilizer was aft of the pusher propeller, mounted between and connecting the two booms.

 

The first Skymaster, Model 336, had fixed landing gear and initially flew on February 28, 1961. It went into production in May 1963 with 195 being produced through mid-1964. In February 1965, Cessna introduced the larger Model 337 Super Skymaster with more powerful engines, retractable landing gear, and a dorsal air scoop for the rear engine (the "Super" prefix was subsequently dropped from the name). In 1966, the turbocharged T337 was introduced, and in 1973, the pressurized P337G entered production.

The type was very prolific and Cessna built 2.993 Skymasters of all variants, including 513 military O-2 (nicknamed "Oscar Deuce") versions from 1967 onwards. The latter featured underwing ordnance hard points to hold unguided rockets, gun pods or flares, and served in the forward air control (FAC) role and psychological operations (PSYOPS) by the US military between 1967 and 2010. Production in America ended in 1982, but was continued by Reims in France, with the FTB337 STOL and the military FTMA “Milirole”.

 

Both civil and military Cessna 336/337 version had long service careers, and some were considerably modified for new operators and uses. Among the most drastic conversions was the Spectrum SA-550, built by Spectrum Aircraft Corporation of Van Nuys, California, in the mid-1980s: Spectrum took the 336/337 airframe and removed the front engine, lengthened the nose to maintain the center of gravity, and replaced the rear piston engine with a pusher turboprop which offered more power than the combined pair of original petrol engines. The Spectrum SA-550 conversion also came together with an optional modernization package that prolonged the airframes’ service life, so that modified machines could well serve on for 20 years or more.

 

This drastic conversion was executed for both military and civil operators. The best-known military SA-550s were six former USAF O-2A airframes, which had been transferred to the U.S. Navy in 1983 for use as range controllers with VA-122 at NAS Lemoore, California. These aircraft were operationally nicknamed “Pelican”, due to the characteristic new nose shape, and the name unofficially caught on.

However, the SA-550 package was only adopted sporadically by private operators, but it became quite popular among several major police and fire departments. Typical duties for these machines included border/drug patrol, surveillance/observation duties (e.g. traffic, forest fire) and special tasks, including drug interdiction as well for SAR missions and undercover operations like narcotics and serialized criminal investigations. Some SA-550s were accordingly modified and individually outfitted with suitable sensors, including IR/low light cameras, searchlights, and internal auxiliary tanks. None were armed, even though some aircraft featured underwing hardpoints for external extra tanks, flare dispensers for nocturnal operations or smoke charge dispensers for ground target marking to guide water bombers to hidden forest fires.

 

The type’s versatility, low noise level, high travel speed and good loitering time in the operational area at low speed proved to be vital assets for these public service operators and justified its relatively high maintenance costs. A handful of the modernized Spectrum SA-550 machines were still in active service after the Millennium, primarily in the USA.

  

General characteristics:

Crew: 1 + 3 passengers (up to 5 passengers possible in special seat configuration)

Length: 32 ft 6½ in (9.94 m)

Wingspan: 38 ft ¾ in (11.62 m)

Height: 9 ft 2 in (2.79 m)

Wing area: 201 sq ft (18.81 m²)

Aspect ratio: 7.18:1

Airfoil: NACA 2412 at root, NACA 2409 at tip

Empty weight: 2,655 lb (1,204 kg)

Max takeoff weight: 4,400 lb (1,996 kg)

Fuel capacity: 92 US gal (77 imp gal; 350 l) normal,

128 US gal (107 imp gal; 480 l) with auxiliary tank

in the cabin instead of two passenger seats

 

Powerplant:

1× Pratt & Whitney PT6A-27 turboprop engine, delivering 550 shp (410 kW) and

driving a four-blade McCauley fully-feathering, constant-speed propeller, 6 ft 4 in (1.93 m) diameter

 

Performance:

Maximum speed: 199 mph (320 km/h, 173 kn) at sea level

Cruise speed: 144 mph (232 km/h, 125 kn) at 10,000 ft (3,000 m) (econ cruise)

Stall speed: 69 mph (111 km/h, 60 kn)

Range: 1421 mi (2.288 km, 1.243 nmi) at 10.000 ft (3.050 m) altitude and economy cruise

Service ceiling: 19,500 ft (5,900 m)

Rate of climb: 1,200 ft/min (6.1 m/s)

Takeoff distance to 50 ft (15m): 1,545 ft (471 m)

Landing distance from 50 ft (15m): 1,650 ft (500 m)

  

The kit and its assembly:

This build is the combination of ingredients that had already been stashed away for a long time, and the “Red Lights” Group Build at whatifmodellers.com in early 2021 was a good motivator and occasion to finally put everything together.

 

The basis is an ARII 1:72 Cessna T337 model kit – I had purchased it long ago with the expectation to create a military Skymaster from it, but I was confused by a fixed landing gear which would make it a 336? Well, without a further concrete plan the kit preliminarily landed in The Stash™…

However, the ARII model features the optional observation windows in the doors on the starboard side, in the form of a complete(!) fuselage half, so that it lends itself to a police or firefighter aircraft of some sort. This idea was furthermore fueled by a decal sheet that I had been given from a friend, left over from a 1:72 Italeri JetRanger, with three optional police helicopter markings.

The final creative element was the real-world “Pelican” conversion of six O-2As for the US Navy, as mentioned in the background above: the front engine was replaced with a longer nose and the engine configuration changed to a pusher-only aircraft with a single powerful turboprop engine. This looked so odd that I wanted to modify the ARII Cessna in a similar fashion, too, and all these factors came together in this model.

 

My Arii Cessna 337 kit is a re-boxing from 2009, but its origins date back to Eidai in 1972 and that’s just what you get: a vintage thing with some flash and sinkholes, raised (but fine) surface details and pretty crude seams with bulges and gaps. Some PSR is direly necessary, esp. the fit of the fuselage halves is cringeworthy. The clear parts were no source of joy, either; especially the windscreen turned out to be thick, very streaky (to a degree that I’d almost call it opaque!) and even not fully molded! The side glazing was also not very clear. I tried to improve the situation through polishing, but if the basis is already poor, there’s little you can do about it. Hrmpf.

 

However, the kit was built mostly OOB, including the extra O-2 glazing in the lower doors, but with some mods. One is a (barely visible) extra tank in the cabin’s rear, plus a pilot and an observer figure placed into the tight front seats. The extended “Pelican” nose was a lucky find – I was afraid that I had had to sculpt a nose from scratch with 2C putty. But I found a radome from a Hasegawa RA-5C, left over from a model I built in the Eighties and that has since long fallen apart. However, this nose fitted almost perfectly in size and shape, I just “blunted” the tip a little. Additionally, both the hull in front of the dashboard and the Vigilante radome were filled with as many lead beads as possible to keep the nose down.

 

The kit’s OOB spatted, fixed landing gear was retained – even though it is dubious for a Cessna 337, because this type had a fully retractable landing gear, and the model has the landing gear covers actually molded into the lower fuselage. On the other side, the Cessna 336’s fixed landing gear looks quite different, too! However, this is a what-if model, and a fixed landing gear might have been a measure to reduce maintenance costs?

 

The propeller was replaced with a resin four-blade aftermarket piece (from CMK, probably the best-fitting thing on this build!) on my standard metal axis/styrene tube adapter arrangement. The propeller belongs to a Shorts Tucano, but I think that it works well on the converted Cessna and its powerful pusher engine, even though in the real world, the SA-550 is AFAIK driven by a three-blade prop. For the different engine I also enlarged the dorsal air intake with a 1.5 mm piece of styrene sheet added on top of the molded original air scoop and added a pair of ventral exhaust stubs (scratched from sprue material).

Another addition is a pair of winglets, made from 0.5 mm styrene sheet – an upgrade which I found on several late Cessna 337s in various versions. They just add to the modernized look of the aircraft. For the intended observation role, a hemispherical fairing under the nose hides a 180° camera, and I added some antennae around the hull.

 

However, a final word concerning the model kit itself: nothing fits, be warned! While the kit is a simple affair and looks quite good in the box, assembling it turned out to be a nightmare, with flash, sinkholes, a brittle styrene and gaps everywhere. This includes the clear parts, which are pretty thick and blurry. The worst thing is the windscreen, which is not only EXTRA thick and EXTRA blurry, it was also not completely molded, with gaps on both sides. I tried to get it clearer through manual polishing, but the streaky blurs are integral – no hope for improvement unless you completely replace the parts! If I ever build a Cessna 337/O-2 again, I will give the Airfix kit a try, it can only be better…

  

Painting and markings:

The choice between the operator options from the JetRanger sheet was hard, it included Sweden and Italy, but I eventually settled for the LAPD because the livery looks cool and this police department not only operates helicopters, but also some fixed-wing aircraft.

 

I adapted the LAPD’s classic black-and-white police helicopter livery (Gloss White and Black, Humbrol 22 and 21, respectively) to the Cessna and extended it to the wings. At this point – already upset because of the poor fit of the hardware – disaster struck in the form of Humbrol’s 22 turning into a pinkish ivory upon curing! In the tin, the paint and its pigments looked pretty white and “clean”, and I assume that it’s the thinner that caused this change. What a crap! It’s probably the third tin with 22 that causes trouble, even though in different peculiarities!

The result was total rubbish, though, and I tried to rub the paint off as good as possible on the small model with its many windows, the fixed, delicate landing gear and the wing support struts. Then I overpainted the areas with Revell 301 (Semi-matt White). While this enamel yielded the intended pure white tone, the paint itself is rather gooey and not easy to work with, so that the overall finish turned out worse than desired. At least the black paint worked properly. The demarcations were created with black decal stripes (TL Modellbau), because the tiny model left little room for complex masking measures – and I did not risk any more painting accidents.

 

Since the aircraft would be kept shiny and clean, I just did a light black ink washing to emphasize surface details and did a light panel post-shading on the black areas, not for weathering but rather to accent surface structures. No further weathering was done (and necessary).

 

The markings/decals come – as mentioned above – from an Italeri 1:72 JetRanger, but they were augmented with some additional markings, e. g. grey walkways on the wings and “L-A-P-D” in large black letters under the wings, to distract from the poor finish of the white paint around them…

Finally, the kit was sealed overall with Italeri semi-gloss acrylic varnish, just with a matt anti-glare shield in front of the windscreen, which received thin white trim lines (generic decal stripes).

  

A challenging build due to the Arii kit’s rather poor basis, the massive rhinoplasty and the crisp paint scheme. However, I like the result – what-if models do not always have to be armed military vehicles, there’s potential in other genres, too. And this mono-engine “Pelican” Skymaster plays its role as a “flying eye” in police service credibly and well. However, this was my first and last Eidai kit…

+++ DISCLAIMER +++

Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based on historical facts. BEWARE!

  

Some background:

The Cessna Model 336 and 337 “Skymaster” were American twin-engine civil utility aircraft built in a unique push-pull configuration. Their engines were mounted in the nose and rear of its pod-style fuselage. Twin booms extended aft of the wings to the vertical stabilizers, with the rear engine between them. The horizontal stabilizer was aft of the pusher propeller, mounted between and connecting the two booms.

 

The first Skymaster, Model 336, had fixed landing gear and initially flew on February 28, 1961. It went into production in May 1963 with 195 being produced through mid-1964. In February 1965, Cessna introduced the larger Model 337 Super Skymaster with more powerful engines, retractable landing gear, and a dorsal air scoop for the rear engine (the "Super" prefix was subsequently dropped from the name). In 1966, the turbocharged T337 was introduced, and in 1973, the pressurized P337G entered production.

The type was very prolific and Cessna built 2.993 Skymasters of all variants, including 513 military O-2 (nicknamed "Oscar Deuce") versions from 1967 onwards. The latter featured underwing ordnance hard points to hold unguided rockets, gun pods or flares, and served in the forward air control (FAC) role and psychological operations (PSYOPS) by the US military between 1967 and 2010. Production in America ended in 1982, but was continued by Reims in France, with the FTB337 STOL and the military FTMA “Milirole”.

 

Both civil and military Cessna 336/337 version had long service careers, and some were considerably modified for new operators and uses. Among the most drastic conversions was the Spectrum SA-550, built by Spectrum Aircraft Corporation of Van Nuys, California, in the mid-1980s: Spectrum took the 336/337 airframe and removed the front engine, lengthened the nose to maintain the center of gravity, and replaced the rear piston engine with a pusher turboprop which offered more power than the combined pair of original petrol engines. The Spectrum SA-550 conversion also came together with an optional modernization package that prolonged the airframes’ service life, so that modified machines could well serve on for 20 years or more.

 

This drastic conversion was executed for both military and civil operators. The best-known military SA-550s were six former USAF O-2A airframes, which had been transferred to the U.S. Navy in 1983 for use as range controllers with VA-122 at NAS Lemoore, California. These aircraft were operationally nicknamed “Pelican”, due to the characteristic new nose shape, and the name unofficially caught on.

However, the SA-550 package was only adopted sporadically by private operators, but it became quite popular among several major police and fire departments. Typical duties for these machines included border/drug patrol, surveillance/observation duties (e.g. traffic, forest fire) and special tasks, including drug interdiction as well for SAR missions and undercover operations like narcotics and serialized criminal investigations. Some SA-550s were accordingly modified and individually outfitted with suitable sensors, including IR/low light cameras, searchlights, and internal auxiliary tanks. None were armed, even though some aircraft featured underwing hardpoints for external extra tanks, flare dispensers for nocturnal operations or smoke charge dispensers for ground target marking to guide water bombers to hidden forest fires.

 

The type’s versatility, low noise level, high travel speed and good loitering time in the operational area at low speed proved to be vital assets for these public service operators and justified its relatively high maintenance costs. A handful of the modernized Spectrum SA-550 machines were still in active service after the Millennium, primarily in the USA.

  

General characteristics:

Crew: 1 + 3 passengers (up to 5 passengers possible in special seat configuration)

Length: 32 ft 6½ in (9.94 m)

Wingspan: 38 ft ¾ in (11.62 m)

Height: 9 ft 2 in (2.79 m)

Wing area: 201 sq ft (18.81 m²)

Aspect ratio: 7.18:1

Airfoil: NACA 2412 at root, NACA 2409 at tip

Empty weight: 2,655 lb (1,204 kg)

Max takeoff weight: 4,400 lb (1,996 kg)

Fuel capacity: 92 US gal (77 imp gal; 350 l) normal,

128 US gal (107 imp gal; 480 l) with auxiliary tank

in the cabin instead of two passenger seats

 

Powerplant:

1× Pratt & Whitney PT6A-27 turboprop engine, delivering 550 shp (410 kW) and

driving a four-blade McCauley fully-feathering, constant-speed propeller, 6 ft 4 in (1.93 m) diameter

 

Performance:

Maximum speed: 199 mph (320 km/h, 173 kn) at sea level

Cruise speed: 144 mph (232 km/h, 125 kn) at 10,000 ft (3,000 m) (econ cruise)

Stall speed: 69 mph (111 km/h, 60 kn)

Range: 1421 mi (2.288 km, 1.243 nmi) at 10.000 ft (3.050 m) altitude and economy cruise

Service ceiling: 19,500 ft (5,900 m)

Rate of climb: 1,200 ft/min (6.1 m/s)

Takeoff distance to 50 ft (15m): 1,545 ft (471 m)

Landing distance from 50 ft (15m): 1,650 ft (500 m)

  

The kit and its assembly:

This build is the combination of ingredients that had already been stashed away for a long time, and the “Red Lights” Group Build at whatifmodellers.com in early 2021 was a good motivator and occasion to finally put everything together.

 

The basis is an ARII 1:72 Cessna T337 model kit – I had purchased it long ago with the expectation to create a military Skymaster from it, but I was confused by a fixed landing gear which would make it a 336? Well, without a further concrete plan the kit preliminarily landed in The Stash™…

However, the ARII model features the optional observation windows in the doors on the starboard side, in the form of a complete(!) fuselage half, so that it lends itself to a police or firefighter aircraft of some sort. This idea was furthermore fueled by a decal sheet that I had been given from a friend, left over from a 1:72 Italeri JetRanger, with three optional police helicopter markings.

The final creative element was the real-world “Pelican” conversion of six O-2As for the US Navy, as mentioned in the background above: the front engine was replaced with a longer nose and the engine configuration changed to a pusher-only aircraft with a single powerful turboprop engine. This looked so odd that I wanted to modify the ARII Cessna in a similar fashion, too, and all these factors came together in this model.

 

My Arii Cessna 337 kit is a re-boxing from 2009, but its origins date back to Eidai in 1972 and that’s just what you get: a vintage thing with some flash and sinkholes, raised (but fine) surface details and pretty crude seams with bulges and gaps. Some PSR is direly necessary, esp. the fit of the fuselage halves is cringeworthy. The clear parts were no source of joy, either; especially the windscreen turned out to be thick, very streaky (to a degree that I’d almost call it opaque!) and even not fully molded! The side glazing was also not very clear. I tried to improve the situation through polishing, but if the basis is already poor, there’s little you can do about it. Hrmpf.

 

However, the kit was built mostly OOB, including the extra O-2 glazing in the lower doors, but with some mods. One is a (barely visible) extra tank in the cabin’s rear, plus a pilot and an observer figure placed into the tight front seats. The extended “Pelican” nose was a lucky find – I was afraid that I had had to sculpt a nose from scratch with 2C putty. But I found a radome from a Hasegawa RA-5C, left over from a model I built in the Eighties and that has since long fallen apart. However, this nose fitted almost perfectly in size and shape, I just “blunted” the tip a little. Additionally, both the hull in front of the dashboard and the Vigilante radome were filled with as many lead beads as possible to keep the nose down.

 

The kit’s OOB spatted, fixed landing gear was retained – even though it is dubious for a Cessna 337, because this type had a fully retractable landing gear, and the model has the landing gear covers actually molded into the lower fuselage. On the other side, the Cessna 336’s fixed landing gear looks quite different, too! However, this is a what-if model, and a fixed landing gear might have been a measure to reduce maintenance costs?

 

The propeller was replaced with a resin four-blade aftermarket piece (from CMK, probably the best-fitting thing on this build!) on my standard metal axis/styrene tube adapter arrangement. The propeller belongs to a Shorts Tucano, but I think that it works well on the converted Cessna and its powerful pusher engine, even though in the real world, the SA-550 is AFAIK driven by a three-blade prop. For the different engine I also enlarged the dorsal air intake with a 1.5 mm piece of styrene sheet added on top of the molded original air scoop and added a pair of ventral exhaust stubs (scratched from sprue material).

Another addition is a pair of winglets, made from 0.5 mm styrene sheet – an upgrade which I found on several late Cessna 337s in various versions. They just add to the modernized look of the aircraft. For the intended observation role, a hemispherical fairing under the nose hides a 180° camera, and I added some antennae around the hull.

 

However, a final word concerning the model kit itself: nothing fits, be warned! While the kit is a simple affair and looks quite good in the box, assembling it turned out to be a nightmare, with flash, sinkholes, a brittle styrene and gaps everywhere. This includes the clear parts, which are pretty thick and blurry. The worst thing is the windscreen, which is not only EXTRA thick and EXTRA blurry, it was also not completely molded, with gaps on both sides. I tried to get it clearer through manual polishing, but the streaky blurs are integral – no hope for improvement unless you completely replace the parts! If I ever build a Cessna 337/O-2 again, I will give the Airfix kit a try, it can only be better…

  

Painting and markings:

The choice between the operator options from the JetRanger sheet was hard, it included Sweden and Italy, but I eventually settled for the LAPD because the livery looks cool and this police department not only operates helicopters, but also some fixed-wing aircraft.

 

I adapted the LAPD’s classic black-and-white police helicopter livery (Gloss White and Black, Humbrol 22 and 21, respectively) to the Cessna and extended it to the wings. At this point – already upset because of the poor fit of the hardware – disaster struck in the form of Humbrol’s 22 turning into a pinkish ivory upon curing! In the tin, the paint and its pigments looked pretty white and “clean”, and I assume that it’s the thinner that caused this change. What a crap! It’s probably the third tin with 22 that causes trouble, even though in different peculiarities!

The result was total rubbish, though, and I tried to rub the paint off as good as possible on the small model with its many windows, the fixed, delicate landing gear and the wing support struts. Then I overpainted the areas with Revell 301 (Semi-matt White). While this enamel yielded the intended pure white tone, the paint itself is rather gooey and not easy to work with, so that the overall finish turned out worse than desired. At least the black paint worked properly. The demarcations were created with black decal stripes (TL Modellbau), because the tiny model left little room for complex masking measures – and I did not risk any more painting accidents.

 

Since the aircraft would be kept shiny and clean, I just did a light black ink washing to emphasize surface details and did a light panel post-shading on the black areas, not for weathering but rather to accent surface structures. No further weathering was done (and necessary).

 

The markings/decals come – as mentioned above – from an Italeri 1:72 JetRanger, but they were augmented with some additional markings, e. g. grey walkways on the wings and “L-A-P-D” in large black letters under the wings, to distract from the poor finish of the white paint around them…

Finally, the kit was sealed overall with Italeri semi-gloss acrylic varnish, just with a matt anti-glare shield in front of the windscreen, which received thin white trim lines (generic decal stripes).

  

A challenging build due to the Arii kit’s rather poor basis, the massive rhinoplasty and the crisp paint scheme. However, I like the result – what-if models do not always have to be armed military vehicles, there’s potential in other genres, too. And this mono-engine “Pelican” Skymaster plays its role as a “flying eye” in police service credibly and well. However, this was my first and last Eidai kit…

+++ DISCLAIMER +++

Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based on historical facts. BEWARE!

  

Some background:

The Cessna Model 336 and 337 “Skymaster” were American twin-engine civil utility aircraft built in a unique push-pull configuration. Their engines were mounted in the nose and rear of its pod-style fuselage. Twin booms extended aft of the wings to the vertical stabilizers, with the rear engine between them. The horizontal stabilizer was aft of the pusher propeller, mounted between and connecting the two booms.

 

The first Skymaster, Model 336, had fixed landing gear and initially flew on February 28, 1961. It went into production in May 1963 with 195 being produced through mid-1964. In February 1965, Cessna introduced the larger Model 337 Super Skymaster with more powerful engines, retractable landing gear, and a dorsal air scoop for the rear engine (the "Super" prefix was subsequently dropped from the name). In 1966, the turbocharged T337 was introduced, and in 1973, the pressurized P337G entered production.

The type was very prolific and Cessna built 2.993 Skymasters of all variants, including 513 military O-2 (nicknamed "Oscar Deuce") versions from 1967 onwards. The latter featured underwing ordnance hard points to hold unguided rockets, gun pods or flares, and served in the forward air control (FAC) role and psychological operations (PSYOPS) by the US military between 1967 and 2010. Production in America ended in 1982, but was continued by Reims in France, with the FTB337 STOL and the military FTMA “Milirole”.

 

Both civil and military Cessna 336/337 version had long service careers, and some were considerably modified for new operators and uses. Among the most drastic conversions was the Spectrum SA-550, built by Spectrum Aircraft Corporation of Van Nuys, California, in the mid-1980s: Spectrum took the 336/337 airframe and removed the front engine, lengthened the nose to maintain the center of gravity, and replaced the rear piston engine with a pusher turboprop which offered more power than the combined pair of original petrol engines. The Spectrum SA-550 conversion also came together with an optional modernization package that prolonged the airframes’ service life, so that modified machines could well serve on for 20 years or more.

 

This drastic conversion was executed for both military and civil operators. The best-known military SA-550s were six former USAF O-2A airframes, which had been transferred to the U.S. Navy in 1983 for use as range controllers with VA-122 at NAS Lemoore, California. These aircraft were operationally nicknamed “Pelican”, due to the characteristic new nose shape, and the name unofficially caught on.

However, the SA-550 package was only adopted sporadically by private operators, but it became quite popular among several major police and fire departments. Typical duties for these machines included border/drug patrol, surveillance/observation duties (e.g. traffic, forest fire) and special tasks, including drug interdiction as well for SAR missions and undercover operations like narcotics and serialized criminal investigations. Some SA-550s were accordingly modified and individually outfitted with suitable sensors, including IR/low light cameras, searchlights, and internal auxiliary tanks. None were armed, even though some aircraft featured underwing hardpoints for external extra tanks, flare dispensers for nocturnal operations or smoke charge dispensers for ground target marking to guide water bombers to hidden forest fires.

 

The type’s versatility, low noise level, high travel speed and good loitering time in the operational area at low speed proved to be vital assets for these public service operators and justified its relatively high maintenance costs. A handful of the modernized Spectrum SA-550 machines were still in active service after the Millennium, primarily in the USA.

  

General characteristics:

Crew: 1 + 3 passengers (up to 5 passengers possible in special seat configuration)

Length: 32 ft 6½ in (9.94 m)

Wingspan: 38 ft ¾ in (11.62 m)

Height: 9 ft 2 in (2.79 m)

Wing area: 201 sq ft (18.81 m²)

Aspect ratio: 7.18:1

Airfoil: NACA 2412 at root, NACA 2409 at tip

Empty weight: 2,655 lb (1,204 kg)

Max takeoff weight: 4,400 lb (1,996 kg)

Fuel capacity: 92 US gal (77 imp gal; 350 l) normal,

128 US gal (107 imp gal; 480 l) with auxiliary tank

in the cabin instead of two passenger seats

 

Powerplant:

1× Pratt & Whitney PT6A-27 turboprop engine, delivering 550 shp (410 kW) and

driving a four-blade McCauley fully-feathering, constant-speed propeller, 6 ft 4 in (1.93 m) diameter

 

Performance:

Maximum speed: 199 mph (320 km/h, 173 kn) at sea level

Cruise speed: 144 mph (232 km/h, 125 kn) at 10,000 ft (3,000 m) (econ cruise)

Stall speed: 69 mph (111 km/h, 60 kn)

Range: 1421 mi (2.288 km, 1.243 nmi) at 10.000 ft (3.050 m) altitude and economy cruise

Service ceiling: 19,500 ft (5,900 m)

Rate of climb: 1,200 ft/min (6.1 m/s)

Takeoff distance to 50 ft (15m): 1,545 ft (471 m)

Landing distance from 50 ft (15m): 1,650 ft (500 m)

  

The kit and its assembly:

This build is the combination of ingredients that had already been stashed away for a long time, and the “Red Lights” Group Build at whatifmodellers.com in early 2021 was a good motivator and occasion to finally put everything together.

 

The basis is an ARII 1:72 Cessna T337 model kit – I had purchased it long ago with the expectation to create a military Skymaster from it, but I was confused by a fixed landing gear which would make it a 336? Well, without a further concrete plan the kit preliminarily landed in The Stash™…

However, the ARII model features the optional observation windows in the doors on the starboard side, in the form of a complete(!) fuselage half, so that it lends itself to a police or firefighter aircraft of some sort. This idea was furthermore fueled by a decal sheet that I had been given from a friend, left over from a 1:72 Italeri JetRanger, with three optional police helicopter markings.

The final creative element was the real-world “Pelican” conversion of six O-2As for the US Navy, as mentioned in the background above: the front engine was replaced with a longer nose and the engine configuration changed to a pusher-only aircraft with a single powerful turboprop engine. This looked so odd that I wanted to modify the ARII Cessna in a similar fashion, too, and all these factors came together in this model.

 

My Arii Cessna 337 kit is a re-boxing from 2009, but its origins date back to Eidai in 1972 and that’s just what you get: a vintage thing with some flash and sinkholes, raised (but fine) surface details and pretty crude seams with bulges and gaps. Some PSR is direly necessary, esp. the fit of the fuselage halves is cringeworthy. The clear parts were no source of joy, either; especially the windscreen turned out to be thick, very streaky (to a degree that I’d almost call it opaque!) and even not fully molded! The side glazing was also not very clear. I tried to improve the situation through polishing, but if the basis is already poor, there’s little you can do about it. Hrmpf.

 

However, the kit was built mostly OOB, including the extra O-2 glazing in the lower doors, but with some mods. One is a (barely visible) extra tank in the cabin’s rear, plus a pilot and an observer figure placed into the tight front seats. The extended “Pelican” nose was a lucky find – I was afraid that I had had to sculpt a nose from scratch with 2C putty. But I found a radome from a Hasegawa RA-5C, left over from a model I built in the Eighties and that has since long fallen apart. However, this nose fitted almost perfectly in size and shape, I just “blunted” the tip a little. Additionally, both the hull in front of the dashboard and the Vigilante radome were filled with as many lead beads as possible to keep the nose down.

 

The kit’s OOB spatted, fixed landing gear was retained – even though it is dubious for a Cessna 337, because this type had a fully retractable landing gear, and the model has the landing gear covers actually molded into the lower fuselage. On the other side, the Cessna 336’s fixed landing gear looks quite different, too! However, this is a what-if model, and a fixed landing gear might have been a measure to reduce maintenance costs?

 

The propeller was replaced with a resin four-blade aftermarket piece (from CMK, probably the best-fitting thing on this build!) on my standard metal axis/styrene tube adapter arrangement. The propeller belongs to a Shorts Tucano, but I think that it works well on the converted Cessna and its powerful pusher engine, even though in the real world, the SA-550 is AFAIK driven by a three-blade prop. For the different engine I also enlarged the dorsal air intake with a 1.5 mm piece of styrene sheet added on top of the molded original air scoop and added a pair of ventral exhaust stubs (scratched from sprue material).

Another addition is a pair of winglets, made from 0.5 mm styrene sheet – an upgrade which I found on several late Cessna 337s in various versions. They just add to the modernized look of the aircraft. For the intended observation role, a hemispherical fairing under the nose hides a 180° camera, and I added some antennae around the hull.

 

However, a final word concerning the model kit itself: nothing fits, be warned! While the kit is a simple affair and looks quite good in the box, assembling it turned out to be a nightmare, with flash, sinkholes, a brittle styrene and gaps everywhere. This includes the clear parts, which are pretty thick and blurry. The worst thing is the windscreen, which is not only EXTRA thick and EXTRA blurry, it was also not completely molded, with gaps on both sides. I tried to get it clearer through manual polishing, but the streaky blurs are integral – no hope for improvement unless you completely replace the parts! If I ever build a Cessna 337/O-2 again, I will give the Airfix kit a try, it can only be better…

  

Painting and markings:

The choice between the operator options from the JetRanger sheet was hard, it included Sweden and Italy, but I eventually settled for the LAPD because the livery looks cool and this police department not only operates helicopters, but also some fixed-wing aircraft.

 

I adapted the LAPD’s classic black-and-white police helicopter livery (Gloss White and Black, Humbrol 22 and 21, respectively) to the Cessna and extended it to the wings. At this point – already upset because of the poor fit of the hardware – disaster struck in the form of Humbrol’s 22 turning into a pinkish ivory upon curing! In the tin, the paint and its pigments looked pretty white and “clean”, and I assume that it’s the thinner that caused this change. What a crap! It’s probably the third tin with 22 that causes trouble, even though in different peculiarities!

The result was total rubbish, though, and I tried to rub the paint off as good as possible on the small model with its many windows, the fixed, delicate landing gear and the wing support struts. Then I overpainted the areas with Revell 301 (Semi-matt White). While this enamel yielded the intended pure white tone, the paint itself is rather gooey and not easy to work with, so that the overall finish turned out worse than desired. At least the black paint worked properly. The demarcations were created with black decal stripes (TL Modellbau), because the tiny model left little room for complex masking measures – and I did not risk any more painting accidents.

 

Since the aircraft would be kept shiny and clean, I just did a light black ink washing to emphasize surface details and did a light panel post-shading on the black areas, not for weathering but rather to accent surface structures. No further weathering was done (and necessary).

 

The markings/decals come – as mentioned above – from an Italeri 1:72 JetRanger, but they were augmented with some additional markings, e. g. grey walkways on the wings and “L-A-P-D” in large black letters under the wings, to distract from the poor finish of the white paint around them…

Finally, the kit was sealed overall with Italeri semi-gloss acrylic varnish, just with a matt anti-glare shield in front of the windscreen, which received thin white trim lines (generic decal stripes).

  

A challenging build due to the Arii kit’s rather poor basis, the massive rhinoplasty and the crisp paint scheme. However, I like the result – what-if models do not always have to be armed military vehicles, there’s potential in other genres, too. And this mono-engine “Pelican” Skymaster plays its role as a “flying eye” in police service credibly and well. However, this was my first and last Eidai kit…

+++ DISCLAIMER +++

Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based on historical facts. BEWARE!

  

Some background:

The Cessna Model 336 and 337 “Skymaster” were American twin-engine civil utility aircraft built in a unique push-pull configuration. Their engines were mounted in the nose and rear of its pod-style fuselage. Twin booms extended aft of the wings to the vertical stabilizers, with the rear engine between them. The horizontal stabilizer was aft of the pusher propeller, mounted between and connecting the two booms.

 

The first Skymaster, Model 336, had fixed landing gear and initially flew on February 28, 1961. It went into production in May 1963 with 195 being produced through mid-1964. In February 1965, Cessna introduced the larger Model 337 Super Skymaster with more powerful engines, retractable landing gear, and a dorsal air scoop for the rear engine (the "Super" prefix was subsequently dropped from the name). In 1966, the turbocharged T337 was introduced, and in 1973, the pressurized P337G entered production.

The type was very prolific and Cessna built 2.993 Skymasters of all variants, including 513 military O-2 (nicknamed "Oscar Deuce") versions from 1967 onwards. The latter featured underwing ordnance hard points to hold unguided rockets, gun pods or flares, and served in the forward air control (FAC) role and psychological operations (PSYOPS) by the US military between 1967 and 2010. Production in America ended in 1982, but was continued by Reims in France, with the FTB337 STOL and the military FTMA “Milirole”.

 

Both civil and military Cessna 336/337 version had long service careers, and some were considerably modified for new operators and uses. Among the most drastic conversions was the Spectrum SA-550, built by Spectrum Aircraft Corporation of Van Nuys, California, in the mid-1980s: Spectrum took the 336/337 airframe and removed the front engine, lengthened the nose to maintain the center of gravity, and replaced the rear piston engine with a pusher turboprop which offered more power than the combined pair of original petrol engines. The Spectrum SA-550 conversion also came together with an optional modernization package that prolonged the airframes’ service life, so that modified machines could well serve on for 20 years or more.

 

This drastic conversion was executed for both military and civil operators. The best-known military SA-550s were six former USAF O-2A airframes, which had been transferred to the U.S. Navy in 1983 for use as range controllers with VA-122 at NAS Lemoore, California. These aircraft were operationally nicknamed “Pelican”, due to the characteristic new nose shape, and the name unofficially caught on.

However, the SA-550 package was only adopted sporadically by private operators, but it became quite popular among several major police and fire departments. Typical duties for these machines included border/drug patrol, surveillance/observation duties (e.g. traffic, forest fire) and special tasks, including drug interdiction as well for SAR missions and undercover operations like narcotics and serialized criminal investigations. Some SA-550s were accordingly modified and individually outfitted with suitable sensors, including IR/low light cameras, searchlights, and internal auxiliary tanks. None were armed, even though some aircraft featured underwing hardpoints for external extra tanks, flare dispensers for nocturnal operations or smoke charge dispensers for ground target marking to guide water bombers to hidden forest fires.

 

The type’s versatility, low noise level, high travel speed and good loitering time in the operational area at low speed proved to be vital assets for these public service operators and justified its relatively high maintenance costs. A handful of the modernized Spectrum SA-550 machines were still in active service after the Millennium, primarily in the USA.

  

General characteristics:

Crew: 1 + 3 passengers (up to 5 passengers possible in special seat configuration)

Length: 32 ft 6½ in (9.94 m)

Wingspan: 38 ft ¾ in (11.62 m)

Height: 9 ft 2 in (2.79 m)

Wing area: 201 sq ft (18.81 m²)

Aspect ratio: 7.18:1

Airfoil: NACA 2412 at root, NACA 2409 at tip

Empty weight: 2,655 lb (1,204 kg)

Max takeoff weight: 4,400 lb (1,996 kg)

Fuel capacity: 92 US gal (77 imp gal; 350 l) normal,

128 US gal (107 imp gal; 480 l) with auxiliary tank

in the cabin instead of two passenger seats

 

Powerplant:

1× Pratt & Whitney PT6A-27 turboprop engine, delivering 550 shp (410 kW) and

driving a four-blade McCauley fully-feathering, constant-speed propeller, 6 ft 4 in (1.93 m) diameter

 

Performance:

Maximum speed: 199 mph (320 km/h, 173 kn) at sea level

Cruise speed: 144 mph (232 km/h, 125 kn) at 10,000 ft (3,000 m) (econ cruise)

Stall speed: 69 mph (111 km/h, 60 kn)

Range: 1421 mi (2.288 km, 1.243 nmi) at 10.000 ft (3.050 m) altitude and economy cruise

Service ceiling: 19,500 ft (5,900 m)

Rate of climb: 1,200 ft/min (6.1 m/s)

Takeoff distance to 50 ft (15m): 1,545 ft (471 m)

Landing distance from 50 ft (15m): 1,650 ft (500 m)

  

The kit and its assembly:

This build is the combination of ingredients that had already been stashed away for a long time, and the “Red Lights” Group Build at whatifmodellers.com in early 2021 was a good motivator and occasion to finally put everything together.

 

The basis is an ARII 1:72 Cessna T337 model kit – I had purchased it long ago with the expectation to create a military Skymaster from it, but I was confused by a fixed landing gear which would make it a 336? Well, without a further concrete plan the kit preliminarily landed in The Stash™…

However, the ARII model features the optional observation windows in the doors on the starboard side, in the form of a complete(!) fuselage half, so that it lends itself to a police or firefighter aircraft of some sort. This idea was furthermore fueled by a decal sheet that I had been given from a friend, left over from a 1:72 Italeri JetRanger, with three optional police helicopter markings.

The final creative element was the real-world “Pelican” conversion of six O-2As for the US Navy, as mentioned in the background above: the front engine was replaced with a longer nose and the engine configuration changed to a pusher-only aircraft with a single powerful turboprop engine. This looked so odd that I wanted to modify the ARII Cessna in a similar fashion, too, and all these factors came together in this model.

 

My Arii Cessna 337 kit is a re-boxing from 2009, but its origins date back to Eidai in 1972 and that’s just what you get: a vintage thing with some flash and sinkholes, raised (but fine) surface details and pretty crude seams with bulges and gaps. Some PSR is direly necessary, esp. the fit of the fuselage halves is cringeworthy. The clear parts were no source of joy, either; especially the windscreen turned out to be thick, very streaky (to a degree that I’d almost call it opaque!) and even not fully molded! The side glazing was also not very clear. I tried to improve the situation through polishing, but if the basis is already poor, there’s little you can do about it. Hrmpf.

 

However, the kit was built mostly OOB, including the extra O-2 glazing in the lower doors, but with some mods. One is a (barely visible) extra tank in the cabin’s rear, plus a pilot and an observer figure placed into the tight front seats. The extended “Pelican” nose was a lucky find – I was afraid that I had had to sculpt a nose from scratch with 2C putty. But I found a radome from a Hasegawa RA-5C, left over from a model I built in the Eighties and that has since long fallen apart. However, this nose fitted almost perfectly in size and shape, I just “blunted” the tip a little. Additionally, both the hull in front of the dashboard and the Vigilante radome were filled with as many lead beads as possible to keep the nose down.

 

The kit’s OOB spatted, fixed landing gear was retained – even though it is dubious for a Cessna 337, because this type had a fully retractable landing gear, and the model has the landing gear covers actually molded into the lower fuselage. On the other side, the Cessna 336’s fixed landing gear looks quite different, too! However, this is a what-if model, and a fixed landing gear might have been a measure to reduce maintenance costs?

 

The propeller was replaced with a resin four-blade aftermarket piece (from CMK, probably the best-fitting thing on this build!) on my standard metal axis/styrene tube adapter arrangement. The propeller belongs to a Shorts Tucano, but I think that it works well on the converted Cessna and its powerful pusher engine, even though in the real world, the SA-550 is AFAIK driven by a three-blade prop. For the different engine I also enlarged the dorsal air intake with a 1.5 mm piece of styrene sheet added on top of the molded original air scoop and added a pair of ventral exhaust stubs (scratched from sprue material).

Another addition is a pair of winglets, made from 0.5 mm styrene sheet – an upgrade which I found on several late Cessna 337s in various versions. They just add to the modernized look of the aircraft. For the intended observation role, a hemispherical fairing under the nose hides a 180° camera, and I added some antennae around the hull.

 

However, a final word concerning the model kit itself: nothing fits, be warned! While the kit is a simple affair and looks quite good in the box, assembling it turned out to be a nightmare, with flash, sinkholes, a brittle styrene and gaps everywhere. This includes the clear parts, which are pretty thick and blurry. The worst thing is the windscreen, which is not only EXTRA thick and EXTRA blurry, it was also not completely molded, with gaps on both sides. I tried to get it clearer through manual polishing, but the streaky blurs are integral – no hope for improvement unless you completely replace the parts! If I ever build a Cessna 337/O-2 again, I will give the Airfix kit a try, it can only be better…

  

Painting and markings:

The choice between the operator options from the JetRanger sheet was hard, it included Sweden and Italy, but I eventually settled for the LAPD because the livery looks cool and this police department not only operates helicopters, but also some fixed-wing aircraft.

 

I adapted the LAPD’s classic black-and-white police helicopter livery (Gloss White and Black, Humbrol 22 and 21, respectively) to the Cessna and extended it to the wings. At this point – already upset because of the poor fit of the hardware – disaster struck in the form of Humbrol’s 22 turning into a pinkish ivory upon curing! In the tin, the paint and its pigments looked pretty white and “clean”, and I assume that it’s the thinner that caused this change. What a crap! It’s probably the third tin with 22 that causes trouble, even though in different peculiarities!

The result was total rubbish, though, and I tried to rub the paint off as good as possible on the small model with its many windows, the fixed, delicate landing gear and the wing support struts. Then I overpainted the areas with Revell 301 (Semi-matt White). While this enamel yielded the intended pure white tone, the paint itself is rather gooey and not easy to work with, so that the overall finish turned out worse than desired. At least the black paint worked properly. The demarcations were created with black decal stripes (TL Modellbau), because the tiny model left little room for complex masking measures – and I did not risk any more painting accidents.

 

Since the aircraft would be kept shiny and clean, I just did a light black ink washing to emphasize surface details and did a light panel post-shading on the black areas, not for weathering but rather to accent surface structures. No further weathering was done (and necessary).

 

The markings/decals come – as mentioned above – from an Italeri 1:72 JetRanger, but they were augmented with some additional markings, e. g. grey walkways on the wings and “L-A-P-D” in large black letters under the wings, to distract from the poor finish of the white paint around them…

Finally, the kit was sealed overall with Italeri semi-gloss acrylic varnish, just with a matt anti-glare shield in front of the windscreen, which received thin white trim lines (generic decal stripes).

  

A challenging build due to the Arii kit’s rather poor basis, the massive rhinoplasty and the crisp paint scheme. However, I like the result – what-if models do not always have to be armed military vehicles, there’s potential in other genres, too. And this mono-engine “Pelican” Skymaster plays its role as a “flying eye” in police service credibly and well. However, this was my first and last Eidai kit…

+++ DISCLAIMER +++

Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based on historical facts. BEWARE!

  

Some background:

The Cessna Model 336 and 337 “Skymaster” were American twin-engine civil utility aircraft built in a unique push-pull configuration. Their engines were mounted in the nose and rear of its pod-style fuselage. Twin booms extended aft of the wings to the vertical stabilizers, with the rear engine between them. The horizontal stabilizer was aft of the pusher propeller, mounted between and connecting the two booms.

 

The first Skymaster, Model 336, had fixed landing gear and initially flew on February 28, 1961. It went into production in May 1963 with 195 being produced through mid-1964. In February 1965, Cessna introduced the larger Model 337 Super Skymaster with more powerful engines, retractable landing gear, and a dorsal air scoop for the rear engine (the "Super" prefix was subsequently dropped from the name). In 1966, the turbocharged T337 was introduced, and in 1973, the pressurized P337G entered production.

The type was very prolific and Cessna built 2.993 Skymasters of all variants, including 513 military O-2 (nicknamed "Oscar Deuce") versions from 1967 onwards. The latter featured underwing ordnance hard points to hold unguided rockets, gun pods or flares, and served in the forward air control (FAC) role and psychological operations (PSYOPS) by the US military between 1967 and 2010. Production in America ended in 1982, but was continued by Reims in France, with the FTB337 STOL and the military FTMA “Milirole”.

 

Both civil and military Cessna 336/337 version had long service careers, and some were considerably modified for new operators and uses. Among the most drastic conversions was the Spectrum SA-550, built by Spectrum Aircraft Corporation of Van Nuys, California, in the mid-1980s: Spectrum took the 336/337 airframe and removed the front engine, lengthened the nose to maintain the center of gravity, and replaced the rear piston engine with a pusher turboprop which offered more power than the combined pair of original petrol engines. The Spectrum SA-550 conversion also came together with an optional modernization package that prolonged the airframes’ service life, so that modified machines could well serve on for 20 years or more.

 

This drastic conversion was executed for both military and civil operators. The best-known military SA-550s were six former USAF O-2A airframes, which had been transferred to the U.S. Navy in 1983 for use as range controllers with VA-122 at NAS Lemoore, California. These aircraft were operationally nicknamed “Pelican”, due to the characteristic new nose shape, and the name unofficially caught on.

However, the SA-550 package was only adopted sporadically by private operators, but it became quite popular among several major police and fire departments. Typical duties for these machines included border/drug patrol, surveillance/observation duties (e.g. traffic, forest fire) and special tasks, including drug interdiction as well for SAR missions and undercover operations like narcotics and serialized criminal investigations. Some SA-550s were accordingly modified and individually outfitted with suitable sensors, including IR/low light cameras, searchlights, and internal auxiliary tanks. None were armed, even though some aircraft featured underwing hardpoints for external extra tanks, flare dispensers for nocturnal operations or smoke charge dispensers for ground target marking to guide water bombers to hidden forest fires.

 

The type’s versatility, low noise level, high travel speed and good loitering time in the operational area at low speed proved to be vital assets for these public service operators and justified its relatively high maintenance costs. A handful of the modernized Spectrum SA-550 machines were still in active service after the Millennium, primarily in the USA.

  

General characteristics:

Crew: 1 + 3 passengers (up to 5 passengers possible in special seat configuration)

Length: 32 ft 6½ in (9.94 m)

Wingspan: 38 ft ¾ in (11.62 m)

Height: 9 ft 2 in (2.79 m)

Wing area: 201 sq ft (18.81 m²)

Aspect ratio: 7.18:1

Airfoil: NACA 2412 at root, NACA 2409 at tip

Empty weight: 2,655 lb (1,204 kg)

Max takeoff weight: 4,400 lb (1,996 kg)

Fuel capacity: 92 US gal (77 imp gal; 350 l) normal,

128 US gal (107 imp gal; 480 l) with auxiliary tank

in the cabin instead of two passenger seats

 

Powerplant:

1× Pratt & Whitney PT6A-27 turboprop engine, delivering 550 shp (410 kW) and

driving a four-blade McCauley fully-feathering, constant-speed propeller, 6 ft 4 in (1.93 m) diameter

 

Performance:

Maximum speed: 199 mph (320 km/h, 173 kn) at sea level

Cruise speed: 144 mph (232 km/h, 125 kn) at 10,000 ft (3,000 m) (econ cruise)

Stall speed: 69 mph (111 km/h, 60 kn)

Range: 1421 mi (2.288 km, 1.243 nmi) at 10.000 ft (3.050 m) altitude and economy cruise

Service ceiling: 19,500 ft (5,900 m)

Rate of climb: 1,200 ft/min (6.1 m/s)

Takeoff distance to 50 ft (15m): 1,545 ft (471 m)

Landing distance from 50 ft (15m): 1,650 ft (500 m)

  

The kit and its assembly:

This build is the combination of ingredients that had already been stashed away for a long time, and the “Red Lights” Group Build at whatifmodellers.com in early 2021 was a good motivator and occasion to finally put everything together.

 

The basis is an ARII 1:72 Cessna T337 model kit – I had purchased it long ago with the expectation to create a military Skymaster from it, but I was confused by a fixed landing gear which would make it a 336? Well, without a further concrete plan the kit preliminarily landed in The Stash™…

However, the ARII model features the optional observation windows in the doors on the starboard side, in the form of a complete(!) fuselage half, so that it lends itself to a police or firefighter aircraft of some sort. This idea was furthermore fueled by a decal sheet that I had been given from a friend, left over from a 1:72 Italeri JetRanger, with three optional police helicopter markings.

The final creative element was the real-world “Pelican” conversion of six O-2As for the US Navy, as mentioned in the background above: the front engine was replaced with a longer nose and the engine configuration changed to a pusher-only aircraft with a single powerful turboprop engine. This looked so odd that I wanted to modify the ARII Cessna in a similar fashion, too, and all these factors came together in this model.

 

My Arii Cessna 337 kit is a re-boxing from 2009, but its origins date back to Eidai in 1972 and that’s just what you get: a vintage thing with some flash and sinkholes, raised (but fine) surface details and pretty crude seams with bulges and gaps. Some PSR is direly necessary, esp. the fit of the fuselage halves is cringeworthy. The clear parts were no source of joy, either; especially the windscreen turned out to be thick, very streaky (to a degree that I’d almost call it opaque!) and even not fully molded! The side glazing was also not very clear. I tried to improve the situation through polishing, but if the basis is already poor, there’s little you can do about it. Hrmpf.

 

However, the kit was built mostly OOB, including the extra O-2 glazing in the lower doors, but with some mods. One is a (barely visible) extra tank in the cabin’s rear, plus a pilot and an observer figure placed into the tight front seats. The extended “Pelican” nose was a lucky find – I was afraid that I had had to sculpt a nose from scratch with 2C putty. But I found a radome from a Hasegawa RA-5C, left over from a model I built in the Eighties and that has since long fallen apart. However, this nose fitted almost perfectly in size and shape, I just “blunted” the tip a little. Additionally, both the hull in front of the dashboard and the Vigilante radome were filled with as many lead beads as possible to keep the nose down.

 

The kit’s OOB spatted, fixed landing gear was retained – even though it is dubious for a Cessna 337, because this type had a fully retractable landing gear, and the model has the landing gear covers actually molded into the lower fuselage. On the other side, the Cessna 336’s fixed landing gear looks quite different, too! However, this is a what-if model, and a fixed landing gear might have been a measure to reduce maintenance costs?

 

The propeller was replaced with a resin four-blade aftermarket piece (from CMK, probably the best-fitting thing on this build!) on my standard metal axis/styrene tube adapter arrangement. The propeller belongs to a Shorts Tucano, but I think that it works well on the converted Cessna and its powerful pusher engine, even though in the real world, the SA-550 is AFAIK driven by a three-blade prop. For the different engine I also enlarged the dorsal air intake with a 1.5 mm piece of styrene sheet added on top of the molded original air scoop and added a pair of ventral exhaust stubs (scratched from sprue material).

Another addition is a pair of winglets, made from 0.5 mm styrene sheet – an upgrade which I found on several late Cessna 337s in various versions. They just add to the modernized look of the aircraft. For the intended observation role, a hemispherical fairing under the nose hides a 180° camera, and I added some antennae around the hull.

 

However, a final word concerning the model kit itself: nothing fits, be warned! While the kit is a simple affair and looks quite good in the box, assembling it turned out to be a nightmare, with flash, sinkholes, a brittle styrene and gaps everywhere. This includes the clear parts, which are pretty thick and blurry. The worst thing is the windscreen, which is not only EXTRA thick and EXTRA blurry, it was also not completely molded, with gaps on both sides. I tried to get it clearer through manual polishing, but the streaky blurs are integral – no hope for improvement unless you completely replace the parts! If I ever build a Cessna 337/O-2 again, I will give the Airfix kit a try, it can only be better…

  

Painting and markings:

The choice between the operator options from the JetRanger sheet was hard, it included Sweden and Italy, but I eventually settled for the LAPD because the livery looks cool and this police department not only operates helicopters, but also some fixed-wing aircraft.

 

I adapted the LAPD’s classic black-and-white police helicopter livery (Gloss White and Black, Humbrol 22 and 21, respectively) to the Cessna and extended it to the wings. At this point – already upset because of the poor fit of the hardware – disaster struck in the form of Humbrol’s 22 turning into a pinkish ivory upon curing! In the tin, the paint and its pigments looked pretty white and “clean”, and I assume that it’s the thinner that caused this change. What a crap! It’s probably the third tin with 22 that causes trouble, even though in different peculiarities!

The result was total rubbish, though, and I tried to rub the paint off as good as possible on the small model with its many windows, the fixed, delicate landing gear and the wing support struts. Then I overpainted the areas with Revell 301 (Semi-matt White). While this enamel yielded the intended pure white tone, the paint itself is rather gooey and not easy to work with, so that the overall finish turned out worse than desired. At least the black paint worked properly. The demarcations were created with black decal stripes (TL Modellbau), because the tiny model left little room for complex masking measures – and I did not risk any more painting accidents.

 

Since the aircraft would be kept shiny and clean, I just did a light black ink washing to emphasize surface details and did a light panel post-shading on the black areas, not for weathering but rather to accent surface structures. No further weathering was done (and necessary).

 

The markings/decals come – as mentioned above – from an Italeri 1:72 JetRanger, but they were augmented with some additional markings, e. g. grey walkways on the wings and “L-A-P-D” in large black letters under the wings, to distract from the poor finish of the white paint around them…

Finally, the kit was sealed overall with Italeri semi-gloss acrylic varnish, just with a matt anti-glare shield in front of the windscreen, which received thin white trim lines (generic decal stripes).

  

A challenging build due to the Arii kit’s rather poor basis, the massive rhinoplasty and the crisp paint scheme. However, I like the result – what-if models do not always have to be armed military vehicles, there’s potential in other genres, too. And this mono-engine “Pelican” Skymaster plays its role as a “flying eye” in police service credibly and well. However, this was my first and last Eidai kit…

Cessna O-2A Skymaster.

 

Intro:

The Cessna O-2 Skymaster (nicknamed "Oscar Deuce") is a military version of the Cessna 337 Super Skymaster, used for forward air control (FAC) and psychological operations (PSYOPS) by the US military between 1967 and 2010.

  

About this creation:

I have a weak spot for odd looking aircrafts, so the Cessna 337 Skymaster with its push-pull engine configuration and twin tail-booms, has always had my interest as a model subject. I wanted it to fit my other range of aircrafts so it`s build to 1:40 scale. Major challenges for this model was: the main-wing shape and the propeller. The main wing shape is done by use of hinges inside the wing. Most of the wedge gap is covered by 1x2 tiles. I found no suitable 2 blade propeller, 7 stud dia. , in LEGOs range of propellers. For my civil Cessna 337 Super Skymaster, I made a brick-built one, just to see if it was possible, and I`m actually quite pleased with the result. For this one I have modified a 9 stud dia. two blade propeller into a 7 stud diameter. I`ve added a self-adhesive printed template onto each propeller blade and sanded off the excessive area. With this modified propeller I was also able to add a spinner.

  

About the Skymaster:

 

Crew: 1/2

 

Powerplant: two 157kw (210hp) Continental IO-360-GB flat-six piston engines.

 

Performance: max speed 336 km/h (206mph); range 2288km (1422 miles); service ceiling 5485m (18.000ft)

 

Dimensions: wingspan 11.63m (38ft 2in); length 9.07m (29ft 9in); height 2.79m (9ft 2in)

 

Weight: 2100kg (4630lb) maximum take-off weight

 

Source: The Encyclopedia of Aircraft

 

More informations about the Cessna O-2A Skymaster at Wikipedia.

 

More pictures on my Flickr

Hope you enjoy the pictures.

Graffiti in Haarlem

Cessna O-2A Skymaster.

 

Intro:

The Cessna O-2 Skymaster (nicknamed "Oscar Deuce") is a military version of the Cessna 337 Super Skymaster, used for forward air control (FAC) and psychological operations (PSYOPS) by the US military between 1967 and 2010.

  

About this creation:

I have a weak spot for odd looking aircrafts, so the Cessna 337 Skymaster with its push-pull engine configuration and twin tail-booms, has always had my interest as a model subject. I wanted it to fit my other range of aircrafts so it`s build to 1:40 scale. Major challenges for this model was: the main-wing shape and the propeller. The main wing shape is done by use of hinges inside the wing. Most of the wedge gap is covered by 1x2 tiles. I found no suitable 2 blade propeller, 7 stud dia. , in LEGOs range of propellers. For my civil Cessna 337 Super Skymaster, I made a brick-built one, just to see if it was possible, and I`m actually quite pleased with the result. For this one I have modified a 9 stud dia. two blade propeller into a 7 stud diameter. I`ve added a self-adhesive printed template onto each propeller blade and sanded off the excessive area. With this modified propeller I was also able to add a spinner.

  

About the Skymaster:

 

Crew: 1/2

 

Powerplant: two 157kw (210hp) Continental IO-360-GB flat-six piston engines.

 

Performance: max speed 336 km/h (206mph); range 2288km (1422 miles); service ceiling 5485m (18.000ft)

 

Dimensions: wingspan 11.63m (38ft 2in); length 9.07m (29ft 9in); height 2.79m (9ft 2in)

 

Weight: 2100kg (4630lb) maximum take-off weight

 

Source: The Encyclopedia of Aircraft

 

More informations about the Cessna O-2A Skymaster at Wikipedia.

 

More pictures on my Flickr

Hope you enjoy the pictures.

I'm a terrible person.

 

:l

Musical * Vespertine * Bird

What a long week it has been. Only three days in the office but they felt super long (even though they weren't) and with the snow (cabin fever) it was just a looooong week. So today I wanted to do something fun. Grabbed some of the Happiness Factory characters from around my desk, a can from Japan, and went to a room with a quote from Muhammad Ali: "I am the greatest!" on the wall and took this shot. I'm happy with it. Cool thing is it is SOOC and didn't play with the lighting in the room at all. And the ice is melting off the roads too so it's all good!:-)

 

-----

Will take a bunch of pictures tomorrow but today I had to double post again...

014/365

One of the USAF's Psyops Psychological Warfare Aircraft lands at RAF Mildenhall

This vintage air dropped leaflet airdropped from North Korea, circa 1999, wishes a "Happy New Year" (literally "New Year receive much good fortune") and 'celebrates' the then-54th anniversary of Unification. Extremely scarce ephemera, as there is a ban on 'holding' leaflets in South Korea. Instead, they were (are) to be turned into the local police. Sourced in Seoul.

+++ DISCLAIMER +++

Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based on historical facts. BEWARE!

  

Some background:

The Cessna Model 336 and 337 “Skymaster” were American twin-engine civil utility aircraft built in a unique push-pull configuration. Their engines were mounted in the nose and rear of its pod-style fuselage. Twin booms extended aft of the wings to the vertical stabilizers, with the rear engine between them. The horizontal stabilizer was aft of the pusher propeller, mounted between and connecting the two booms.

 

The first Skymaster, Model 336, had fixed landing gear and initially flew on February 28, 1961. It went into production in May 1963 with 195 being produced through mid-1964. In February 1965, Cessna introduced the larger Model 337 Super Skymaster with more powerful engines, retractable landing gear, and a dorsal air scoop for the rear engine (the "Super" prefix was subsequently dropped from the name). In 1966, the turbocharged T337 was introduced, and in 1973, the pressurized P337G entered production.

The type was very prolific and Cessna built 2.993 Skymasters of all variants, including 513 military O-2 (nicknamed "Oscar Deuce") versions from 1967 onwards. The latter featured underwing ordnance hard points to hold unguided rockets, gun pods or flares, and served in the forward air control (FAC) role and psychological operations (PSYOPS) by the US military between 1967 and 2010. Production in America ended in 1982, but was continued by Reims in France, with the FTB337 STOL and the military FTMA “Milirole”.

 

Both civil and military Cessna 336/337 version had long service careers, and some were considerably modified for new operators and uses. Among the most drastic conversions was the Spectrum SA-550, built by Spectrum Aircraft Corporation of Van Nuys, California, in the mid-1980s: Spectrum took the 336/337 airframe and removed the front engine, lengthened the nose to maintain the center of gravity, and replaced the rear piston engine with a pusher turboprop which offered more power than the combined pair of original petrol engines. The Spectrum SA-550 conversion also came together with an optional modernization package that prolonged the airframes’ service life, so that modified machines could well serve on for 20 years or more.

 

This drastic conversion was executed for both military and civil operators. The best-known military SA-550s were six former USAF O-2A airframes, which had been transferred to the U.S. Navy in 1983 for use as range controllers with VA-122 at NAS Lemoore, California. These aircraft were operationally nicknamed “Pelican”, due to the characteristic new nose shape, and the name unofficially caught on.

However, the SA-550 package was only adopted sporadically by private operators, but it became quite popular among several major police and fire departments. Typical duties for these machines included border/drug patrol, surveillance/observation duties (e.g. traffic, forest fire) and special tasks, including drug interdiction as well for SAR missions and undercover operations like narcotics and serialized criminal investigations. Some SA-550s were accordingly modified and individually outfitted with suitable sensors, including IR/low light cameras, searchlights, and internal auxiliary tanks. None were armed, even though some aircraft featured underwing hardpoints for external extra tanks, flare dispensers for nocturnal operations or smoke charge dispensers for ground target marking to guide water bombers to hidden forest fires.

 

The type’s versatility, low noise level, high travel speed and good loitering time in the operational area at low speed proved to be vital assets for these public service operators and justified its relatively high maintenance costs. A handful of the modernized Spectrum SA-550 machines were still in active service after the Millennium, primarily in the USA.

  

General characteristics:

Crew: 1 + 3 passengers (up to 5 passengers possible in special seat configuration)

Length: 32 ft 6½ in (9.94 m)

Wingspan: 38 ft ¾ in (11.62 m)

Height: 9 ft 2 in (2.79 m)

Wing area: 201 sq ft (18.81 m²)

Aspect ratio: 7.18:1

Airfoil: NACA 2412 at root, NACA 2409 at tip

Empty weight: 2,655 lb (1,204 kg)

Max takeoff weight: 4,400 lb (1,996 kg)

Fuel capacity: 92 US gal (77 imp gal; 350 l) normal,

128 US gal (107 imp gal; 480 l) with auxiliary tank

in the cabin instead of two passenger seats

 

Powerplant:

1× Pratt & Whitney PT6A-27 turboprop engine, delivering 550 shp (410 kW) and

driving a four-blade McCauley fully-feathering, constant-speed propeller, 6 ft 4 in (1.93 m) diameter

 

Performance:

Maximum speed: 199 mph (320 km/h, 173 kn) at sea level

Cruise speed: 144 mph (232 km/h, 125 kn) at 10,000 ft (3,000 m) (econ cruise)

Stall speed: 69 mph (111 km/h, 60 kn)

Range: 1421 mi (2.288 km, 1.243 nmi) at 10.000 ft (3.050 m) altitude and economy cruise

Service ceiling: 19,500 ft (5,900 m)

Rate of climb: 1,200 ft/min (6.1 m/s)

Takeoff distance to 50 ft (15m): 1,545 ft (471 m)

Landing distance from 50 ft (15m): 1,650 ft (500 m)

  

The kit and its assembly:

This build is the combination of ingredients that had already been stashed away for a long time, and the “Red Lights” Group Build at whatifmodellers.com in early 2021 was a good motivator and occasion to finally put everything together.

 

The basis is an ARII 1:72 Cessna T337 model kit – I had purchased it long ago with the expectation to create a military Skymaster from it, but I was confused by a fixed landing gear which would make it a 336? Well, without a further concrete plan the kit preliminarily landed in The Stash™…

However, the ARII model features the optional observation windows in the doors on the starboard side, in the form of a complete(!) fuselage half, so that it lends itself to a police or firefighter aircraft of some sort. This idea was furthermore fueled by a decal sheet that I had been given from a friend, left over from a 1:72 Italeri JetRanger, with three optional police helicopter markings.

The final creative element was the real-world “Pelican” conversion of six O-2As for the US Navy, as mentioned in the background above: the front engine was replaced with a longer nose and the engine configuration changed to a pusher-only aircraft with a single powerful turboprop engine. This looked so odd that I wanted to modify the ARII Cessna in a similar fashion, too, and all these factors came together in this model.

 

My Arii Cessna 337 kit is a re-boxing from 2009, but its origins date back to Eidai in 1972 and that’s just what you get: a vintage thing with some flash and sinkholes, raised (but fine) surface details and pretty crude seams with bulges and gaps. Some PSR is direly necessary, esp. the fit of the fuselage halves is cringeworthy. The clear parts were no source of joy, either; especially the windscreen turned out to be thick, very streaky (to a degree that I’d almost call it opaque!) and even not fully molded! The side glazing was also not very clear. I tried to improve the situation through polishing, but if the basis is already poor, there’s little you can do about it. Hrmpf.

 

However, the kit was built mostly OOB, including the extra O-2 glazing in the lower doors, but with some mods. One is a (barely visible) extra tank in the cabin’s rear, plus a pilot and an observer figure placed into the tight front seats. The extended “Pelican” nose was a lucky find – I was afraid that I had had to sculpt a nose from scratch with 2C putty. But I found a radome from a Hasegawa RA-5C, left over from a model I built in the Eighties and that has since long fallen apart. However, this nose fitted almost perfectly in size and shape, I just “blunted” the tip a little. Additionally, both the hull in front of the dashboard and the Vigilante radome were filled with as many lead beads as possible to keep the nose down.

 

The kit’s OOB spatted, fixed landing gear was retained – even though it is dubious for a Cessna 337, because this type had a fully retractable landing gear, and the model has the landing gear covers actually molded into the lower fuselage. On the other side, the Cessna 336’s fixed landing gear looks quite different, too! However, this is a what-if model, and a fixed landing gear might have been a measure to reduce maintenance costs?

 

The propeller was replaced with a resin four-blade aftermarket piece (from CMK, probably the best-fitting thing on this build!) on my standard metal axis/styrene tube adapter arrangement. The propeller belongs to a Shorts Tucano, but I think that it works well on the converted Cessna and its powerful pusher engine, even though in the real world, the SA-550 is AFAIK driven by a three-blade prop. For the different engine I also enlarged the dorsal air intake with a 1.5 mm piece of styrene sheet added on top of the molded original air scoop and added a pair of ventral exhaust stubs (scratched from sprue material).

Another addition is a pair of winglets, made from 0.5 mm styrene sheet – an upgrade which I found on several late Cessna 337s in various versions. They just add to the modernized look of the aircraft. For the intended observation role, a hemispherical fairing under the nose hides a 180° camera, and I added some antennae around the hull.

 

However, a final word concerning the model kit itself: nothing fits, be warned! While the kit is a simple affair and looks quite good in the box, assembling it turned out to be a nightmare, with flash, sinkholes, a brittle styrene and gaps everywhere. This includes the clear parts, which are pretty thick and blurry. The worst thing is the windscreen, which is not only EXTRA thick and EXTRA blurry, it was also not completely molded, with gaps on both sides. I tried to get it clearer through manual polishing, but the streaky blurs are integral – no hope for improvement unless you completely replace the parts! If I ever build a Cessna 337/O-2 again, I will give the Airfix kit a try, it can only be better…

  

Painting and markings:

The choice between the operator options from the JetRanger sheet was hard, it included Sweden and Italy, but I eventually settled for the LAPD because the livery looks cool and this police department not only operates helicopters, but also some fixed-wing aircraft.

 

I adapted the LAPD’s classic black-and-white police helicopter livery (Gloss White and Black, Humbrol 22 and 21, respectively) to the Cessna and extended it to the wings. At this point – already upset because of the poor fit of the hardware – disaster struck in the form of Humbrol’s 22 turning into a pinkish ivory upon curing! In the tin, the paint and its pigments looked pretty white and “clean”, and I assume that it’s the thinner that caused this change. What a crap! It’s probably the third tin with 22 that causes trouble, even though in different peculiarities!

The result was total rubbish, though, and I tried to rub the paint off as good as possible on the small model with its many windows, the fixed, delicate landing gear and the wing support struts. Then I overpainted the areas with Revell 301 (Semi-matt White). While this enamel yielded the intended pure white tone, the paint itself is rather gooey and not easy to work with, so that the overall finish turned out worse than desired. At least the black paint worked properly. The demarcations were created with black decal stripes (TL Modellbau), because the tiny model left little room for complex masking measures – and I did not risk any more painting accidents.

 

Since the aircraft would be kept shiny and clean, I just did a light black ink washing to emphasize surface details and did a light panel post-shading on the black areas, not for weathering but rather to accent surface structures. No further weathering was done (and necessary).

 

The markings/decals come – as mentioned above – from an Italeri 1:72 JetRanger, but they were augmented with some additional markings, e. g. grey walkways on the wings and “L-A-P-D” in large black letters under the wings, to distract from the poor finish of the white paint around them…

Finally, the kit was sealed overall with Italeri semi-gloss acrylic varnish, just with a matt anti-glare shield in front of the windscreen, which received thin white trim lines (generic decal stripes).

  

A challenging build due to the Arii kit’s rather poor basis, the massive rhinoplasty and the crisp paint scheme. However, I like the result – what-if models do not always have to be armed military vehicles, there’s potential in other genres, too. And this mono-engine “Pelican” Skymaster plays its role as a “flying eye” in police service credibly and well. However, this was my first and last Eidai kit…

+++ DISCLAIMER +++

Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based on historical facts. BEWARE!

  

Some background:

The Cessna Model 336 and 337 “Skymaster” were American twin-engine civil utility aircraft built in a unique push-pull configuration. Their engines were mounted in the nose and rear of its pod-style fuselage. Twin booms extended aft of the wings to the vertical stabilizers, with the rear engine between them. The horizontal stabilizer was aft of the pusher propeller, mounted between and connecting the two booms.

 

The first Skymaster, Model 336, had fixed landing gear and initially flew on February 28, 1961. It went into production in May 1963 with 195 being produced through mid-1964. In February 1965, Cessna introduced the larger Model 337 Super Skymaster with more powerful engines, retractable landing gear, and a dorsal air scoop for the rear engine (the "Super" prefix was subsequently dropped from the name). In 1966, the turbocharged T337 was introduced, and in 1973, the pressurized P337G entered production.

The type was very prolific and Cessna built 2.993 Skymasters of all variants, including 513 military O-2 (nicknamed "Oscar Deuce") versions from 1967 onwards. The latter featured underwing ordnance hard points to hold unguided rockets, gun pods or flares, and served in the forward air control (FAC) role and psychological operations (PSYOPS) by the US military between 1967 and 2010. Production in America ended in 1982, but was continued by Reims in France, with the FTB337 STOL and the military FTMA “Milirole”.

 

Both civil and military Cessna 336/337 version had long service careers, and some were considerably modified for new operators and uses. Among the most drastic conversions was the Spectrum SA-550, built by Spectrum Aircraft Corporation of Van Nuys, California, in the mid-1980s: Spectrum took the 336/337 airframe and removed the front engine, lengthened the nose to maintain the center of gravity, and replaced the rear piston engine with a pusher turboprop which offered more power than the combined pair of original petrol engines. The Spectrum SA-550 conversion also came together with an optional modernization package that prolonged the airframes’ service life, so that modified machines could well serve on for 20 years or more.

 

This drastic conversion was executed for both military and civil operators. The best-known military SA-550s were six former USAF O-2A airframes, which had been transferred to the U.S. Navy in 1983 for use as range controllers with VA-122 at NAS Lemoore, California. These aircraft were operationally nicknamed “Pelican”, due to the characteristic new nose shape, and the name unofficially caught on.

However, the SA-550 package was only adopted sporadically by private operators, but it became quite popular among several major police and fire departments. Typical duties for these machines included border/drug patrol, surveillance/observation duties (e.g. traffic, forest fire) and special tasks, including drug interdiction as well for SAR missions and undercover operations like narcotics and serialized criminal investigations. Some SA-550s were accordingly modified and individually outfitted with suitable sensors, including IR/low light cameras, searchlights, and internal auxiliary tanks. None were armed, even though some aircraft featured underwing hardpoints for external extra tanks, flare dispensers for nocturnal operations or smoke charge dispensers for ground target marking to guide water bombers to hidden forest fires.

 

The type’s versatility, low noise level, high travel speed and good loitering time in the operational area at low speed proved to be vital assets for these public service operators and justified its relatively high maintenance costs. A handful of the modernized Spectrum SA-550 machines were still in active service after the Millennium, primarily in the USA.

  

General characteristics:

Crew: 1 + 3 passengers (up to 5 passengers possible in special seat configuration)

Length: 32 ft 6½ in (9.94 m)

Wingspan: 38 ft ¾ in (11.62 m)

Height: 9 ft 2 in (2.79 m)

Wing area: 201 sq ft (18.81 m²)

Aspect ratio: 7.18:1

Airfoil: NACA 2412 at root, NACA 2409 at tip

Empty weight: 2,655 lb (1,204 kg)

Max takeoff weight: 4,400 lb (1,996 kg)

Fuel capacity: 92 US gal (77 imp gal; 350 l) normal,

128 US gal (107 imp gal; 480 l) with auxiliary tank

in the cabin instead of two passenger seats

 

Powerplant:

1× Pratt & Whitney PT6A-27 turboprop engine, delivering 550 shp (410 kW) and

driving a four-blade McCauley fully-feathering, constant-speed propeller, 6 ft 4 in (1.93 m) diameter

 

Performance:

Maximum speed: 199 mph (320 km/h, 173 kn) at sea level

Cruise speed: 144 mph (232 km/h, 125 kn) at 10,000 ft (3,000 m) (econ cruise)

Stall speed: 69 mph (111 km/h, 60 kn)

Range: 1421 mi (2.288 km, 1.243 nmi) at 10.000 ft (3.050 m) altitude and economy cruise

Service ceiling: 19,500 ft (5,900 m)

Rate of climb: 1,200 ft/min (6.1 m/s)

Takeoff distance to 50 ft (15m): 1,545 ft (471 m)

Landing distance from 50 ft (15m): 1,650 ft (500 m)

  

The kit and its assembly:

This build is the combination of ingredients that had already been stashed away for a long time, and the “Red Lights” Group Build at whatifmodellers.com in early 2021 was a good motivator and occasion to finally put everything together.

 

The basis is an ARII 1:72 Cessna T337 model kit – I had purchased it long ago with the expectation to create a military Skymaster from it, but I was confused by a fixed landing gear which would make it a 336? Well, without a further concrete plan the kit preliminarily landed in The Stash™…

However, the ARII model features the optional observation windows in the doors on the starboard side, in the form of a complete(!) fuselage half, so that it lends itself to a police or firefighter aircraft of some sort. This idea was furthermore fueled by a decal sheet that I had been given from a friend, left over from a 1:72 Italeri JetRanger, with three optional police helicopter markings.

The final creative element was the real-world “Pelican” conversion of six O-2As for the US Navy, as mentioned in the background above: the front engine was replaced with a longer nose and the engine configuration changed to a pusher-only aircraft with a single powerful turboprop engine. This looked so odd that I wanted to modify the ARII Cessna in a similar fashion, too, and all these factors came together in this model.

 

My Arii Cessna 337 kit is a re-boxing from 2009, but its origins date back to Eidai in 1972 and that’s just what you get: a vintage thing with some flash and sinkholes, raised (but fine) surface details and pretty crude seams with bulges and gaps. Some PSR is direly necessary, esp. the fit of the fuselage halves is cringeworthy. The clear parts were no source of joy, either; especially the windscreen turned out to be thick, very streaky (to a degree that I’d almost call it opaque!) and even not fully molded! The side glazing was also not very clear. I tried to improve the situation through polishing, but if the basis is already poor, there’s little you can do about it. Hrmpf.

 

However, the kit was built mostly OOB, including the extra O-2 glazing in the lower doors, but with some mods. One is a (barely visible) extra tank in the cabin’s rear, plus a pilot and an observer figure placed into the tight front seats. The extended “Pelican” nose was a lucky find – I was afraid that I had had to sculpt a nose from scratch with 2C putty. But I found a radome from a Hasegawa RA-5C, left over from a model I built in the Eighties and that has since long fallen apart. However, this nose fitted almost perfectly in size and shape, I just “blunted” the tip a little. Additionally, both the hull in front of the dashboard and the Vigilante radome were filled with as many lead beads as possible to keep the nose down.

 

The kit’s OOB spatted, fixed landing gear was retained – even though it is dubious for a Cessna 337, because this type had a fully retractable landing gear, and the model has the landing gear covers actually molded into the lower fuselage. On the other side, the Cessna 336’s fixed landing gear looks quite different, too! However, this is a what-if model, and a fixed landing gear might have been a measure to reduce maintenance costs?

 

The propeller was replaced with a resin four-blade aftermarket piece (from CMK, probably the best-fitting thing on this build!) on my standard metal axis/styrene tube adapter arrangement. The propeller belongs to a Shorts Tucano, but I think that it works well on the converted Cessna and its powerful pusher engine, even though in the real world, the SA-550 is AFAIK driven by a three-blade prop. For the different engine I also enlarged the dorsal air intake with a 1.5 mm piece of styrene sheet added on top of the molded original air scoop and added a pair of ventral exhaust stubs (scratched from sprue material).

Another addition is a pair of winglets, made from 0.5 mm styrene sheet – an upgrade which I found on several late Cessna 337s in various versions. They just add to the modernized look of the aircraft. For the intended observation role, a hemispherical fairing under the nose hides a 180° camera, and I added some antennae around the hull.

 

However, a final word concerning the model kit itself: nothing fits, be warned! While the kit is a simple affair and looks quite good in the box, assembling it turned out to be a nightmare, with flash, sinkholes, a brittle styrene and gaps everywhere. This includes the clear parts, which are pretty thick and blurry. The worst thing is the windscreen, which is not only EXTRA thick and EXTRA blurry, it was also not completely molded, with gaps on both sides. I tried to get it clearer through manual polishing, but the streaky blurs are integral – no hope for improvement unless you completely replace the parts! If I ever build a Cessna 337/O-2 again, I will give the Airfix kit a try, it can only be better…

  

Painting and markings:

The choice between the operator options from the JetRanger sheet was hard, it included Sweden and Italy, but I eventually settled for the LAPD because the livery looks cool and this police department not only operates helicopters, but also some fixed-wing aircraft.

 

I adapted the LAPD’s classic black-and-white police helicopter livery (Gloss White and Black, Humbrol 22 and 21, respectively) to the Cessna and extended it to the wings. At this point – already upset because of the poor fit of the hardware – disaster struck in the form of Humbrol’s 22 turning into a pinkish ivory upon curing! In the tin, the paint and its pigments looked pretty white and “clean”, and I assume that it’s the thinner that caused this change. What a crap! It’s probably the third tin with 22 that causes trouble, even though in different peculiarities!

The result was total rubbish, though, and I tried to rub the paint off as good as possible on the small model with its many windows, the fixed, delicate landing gear and the wing support struts. Then I overpainted the areas with Revell 301 (Semi-matt White). While this enamel yielded the intended pure white tone, the paint itself is rather gooey and not easy to work with, so that the overall finish turned out worse than desired. At least the black paint worked properly. The demarcations were created with black decal stripes (TL Modellbau), because the tiny model left little room for complex masking measures – and I did not risk any more painting accidents.

 

Since the aircraft would be kept shiny and clean, I just did a light black ink washing to emphasize surface details and did a light panel post-shading on the black areas, not for weathering but rather to accent surface structures. No further weathering was done (and necessary).

 

The markings/decals come – as mentioned above – from an Italeri 1:72 JetRanger, but they were augmented with some additional markings, e. g. grey walkways on the wings and “L-A-P-D” in large black letters under the wings, to distract from the poor finish of the white paint around them…

Finally, the kit was sealed overall with Italeri semi-gloss acrylic varnish, just with a matt anti-glare shield in front of the windscreen, which received thin white trim lines (generic decal stripes).

  

A challenging build due to the Arii kit’s rather poor basis, the massive rhinoplasty and the crisp paint scheme. However, I like the result – what-if models do not always have to be armed military vehicles, there’s potential in other genres, too. And this mono-engine “Pelican” Skymaster plays its role as a “flying eye” in police service credibly and well. However, this was my first and last Eidai kit…

+++ DISCLAIMER +++

Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based on historical facts. BEWARE!

  

Some background:

The Cessna Model 336 and 337 “Skymaster” were American twin-engine civil utility aircraft built in a unique push-pull configuration. Their engines were mounted in the nose and rear of its pod-style fuselage. Twin booms extended aft of the wings to the vertical stabilizers, with the rear engine between them. The horizontal stabilizer was aft of the pusher propeller, mounted between and connecting the two booms.

 

The first Skymaster, Model 336, had fixed landing gear and initially flew on February 28, 1961. It went into production in May 1963 with 195 being produced through mid-1964. In February 1965, Cessna introduced the larger Model 337 Super Skymaster with more powerful engines, retractable landing gear, and a dorsal air scoop for the rear engine (the "Super" prefix was subsequently dropped from the name). In 1966, the turbocharged T337 was introduced, and in 1973, the pressurized P337G entered production.

The type was very prolific and Cessna built 2.993 Skymasters of all variants, including 513 military O-2 (nicknamed "Oscar Deuce") versions from 1967 onwards. The latter featured underwing ordnance hard points to hold unguided rockets, gun pods or flares, and served in the forward air control (FAC) role and psychological operations (PSYOPS) by the US military between 1967 and 2010. Production in America ended in 1982, but was continued by Reims in France, with the FTB337 STOL and the military FTMA “Milirole”.

 

Both civil and military Cessna 336/337 version had long service careers, and some were considerably modified for new operators and uses. Among the most drastic conversions was the Spectrum SA-550, built by Spectrum Aircraft Corporation of Van Nuys, California, in the mid-1980s: Spectrum took the 336/337 airframe and removed the front engine, lengthened the nose to maintain the center of gravity, and replaced the rear piston engine with a pusher turboprop which offered more power than the combined pair of original petrol engines. The Spectrum SA-550 conversion also came together with an optional modernization package that prolonged the airframes’ service life, so that modified machines could well serve on for 20 years or more.

 

This drastic conversion was executed for both military and civil operators. The best-known military SA-550s were six former USAF O-2A airframes, which had been transferred to the U.S. Navy in 1983 for use as range controllers with VA-122 at NAS Lemoore, California. These aircraft were operationally nicknamed “Pelican”, due to the characteristic new nose shape, and the name unofficially caught on.

However, the SA-550 package was only adopted sporadically by private operators, but it became quite popular among several major police and fire departments. Typical duties for these machines included border/drug patrol, surveillance/observation duties (e.g. traffic, forest fire) and special tasks, including drug interdiction as well for SAR missions and undercover operations like narcotics and serialized criminal investigations. Some SA-550s were accordingly modified and individually outfitted with suitable sensors, including IR/low light cameras, searchlights, and internal auxiliary tanks. None were armed, even though some aircraft featured underwing hardpoints for external extra tanks, flare dispensers for nocturnal operations or smoke charge dispensers for ground target marking to guide water bombers to hidden forest fires.

 

The type’s versatility, low noise level, high travel speed and good loitering time in the operational area at low speed proved to be vital assets for these public service operators and justified its relatively high maintenance costs. A handful of the modernized Spectrum SA-550 machines were still in active service after the Millennium, primarily in the USA.

  

General characteristics:

Crew: 1 + 3 passengers (up to 5 passengers possible in special seat configuration)

Length: 32 ft 6½ in (9.94 m)

Wingspan: 38 ft ¾ in (11.62 m)

Height: 9 ft 2 in (2.79 m)

Wing area: 201 sq ft (18.81 m²)

Aspect ratio: 7.18:1

Airfoil: NACA 2412 at root, NACA 2409 at tip

Empty weight: 2,655 lb (1,204 kg)

Max takeoff weight: 4,400 lb (1,996 kg)

Fuel capacity: 92 US gal (77 imp gal; 350 l) normal,

128 US gal (107 imp gal; 480 l) with auxiliary tank

in the cabin instead of two passenger seats

 

Powerplant:

1× Pratt & Whitney PT6A-27 turboprop engine, delivering 550 shp (410 kW) and

driving a four-blade McCauley fully-feathering, constant-speed propeller, 6 ft 4 in (1.93 m) diameter

 

Performance:

Maximum speed: 199 mph (320 km/h, 173 kn) at sea level

Cruise speed: 144 mph (232 km/h, 125 kn) at 10,000 ft (3,000 m) (econ cruise)

Stall speed: 69 mph (111 km/h, 60 kn)

Range: 1421 mi (2.288 km, 1.243 nmi) at 10.000 ft (3.050 m) altitude and economy cruise

Service ceiling: 19,500 ft (5,900 m)

Rate of climb: 1,200 ft/min (6.1 m/s)

Takeoff distance to 50 ft (15m): 1,545 ft (471 m)

Landing distance from 50 ft (15m): 1,650 ft (500 m)

  

The kit and its assembly:

This build is the combination of ingredients that had already been stashed away for a long time, and the “Red Lights” Group Build at whatifmodellers.com in early 2021 was a good motivator and occasion to finally put everything together.

 

The basis is an ARII 1:72 Cessna T337 model kit – I had purchased it long ago with the expectation to create a military Skymaster from it, but I was confused by a fixed landing gear which would make it a 336? Well, without a further concrete plan the kit preliminarily landed in The Stash™…

However, the ARII model features the optional observation windows in the doors on the starboard side, in the form of a complete(!) fuselage half, so that it lends itself to a police or firefighter aircraft of some sort. This idea was furthermore fueled by a decal sheet that I had been given from a friend, left over from a 1:72 Italeri JetRanger, with three optional police helicopter markings.

The final creative element was the real-world “Pelican” conversion of six O-2As for the US Navy, as mentioned in the background above: the front engine was replaced with a longer nose and the engine configuration changed to a pusher-only aircraft with a single powerful turboprop engine. This looked so odd that I wanted to modify the ARII Cessna in a similar fashion, too, and all these factors came together in this model.

 

My Arii Cessna 337 kit is a re-boxing from 2009, but its origins date back to Eidai in 1972 and that’s just what you get: a vintage thing with some flash and sinkholes, raised (but fine) surface details and pretty crude seams with bulges and gaps. Some PSR is direly necessary, esp. the fit of the fuselage halves is cringeworthy. The clear parts were no source of joy, either; especially the windscreen turned out to be thick, very streaky (to a degree that I’d almost call it opaque!) and even not fully molded! The side glazing was also not very clear. I tried to improve the situation through polishing, but if the basis is already poor, there’s little you can do about it. Hrmpf.

 

However, the kit was built mostly OOB, including the extra O-2 glazing in the lower doors, but with some mods. One is a (barely visible) extra tank in the cabin’s rear, plus a pilot and an observer figure placed into the tight front seats. The extended “Pelican” nose was a lucky find – I was afraid that I had had to sculpt a nose from scratch with 2C putty. But I found a radome from a Hasegawa RA-5C, left over from a model I built in the Eighties and that has since long fallen apart. However, this nose fitted almost perfectly in size and shape, I just “blunted” the tip a little. Additionally, both the hull in front of the dashboard and the Vigilante radome were filled with as many lead beads as possible to keep the nose down.

 

The kit’s OOB spatted, fixed landing gear was retained – even though it is dubious for a Cessna 337, because this type had a fully retractable landing gear, and the model has the landing gear covers actually molded into the lower fuselage. On the other side, the Cessna 336’s fixed landing gear looks quite different, too! However, this is a what-if model, and a fixed landing gear might have been a measure to reduce maintenance costs?

 

The propeller was replaced with a resin four-blade aftermarket piece (from CMK, probably the best-fitting thing on this build!) on my standard metal axis/styrene tube adapter arrangement. The propeller belongs to a Shorts Tucano, but I think that it works well on the converted Cessna and its powerful pusher engine, even though in the real world, the SA-550 is AFAIK driven by a three-blade prop. For the different engine I also enlarged the dorsal air intake with a 1.5 mm piece of styrene sheet added on top of the molded original air scoop and added a pair of ventral exhaust stubs (scratched from sprue material).

Another addition is a pair of winglets, made from 0.5 mm styrene sheet – an upgrade which I found on several late Cessna 337s in various versions. They just add to the modernized look of the aircraft. For the intended observation role, a hemispherical fairing under the nose hides a 180° camera, and I added some antennae around the hull.

 

However, a final word concerning the model kit itself: nothing fits, be warned! While the kit is a simple affair and looks quite good in the box, assembling it turned out to be a nightmare, with flash, sinkholes, a brittle styrene and gaps everywhere. This includes the clear parts, which are pretty thick and blurry. The worst thing is the windscreen, which is not only EXTRA thick and EXTRA blurry, it was also not completely molded, with gaps on both sides. I tried to get it clearer through manual polishing, but the streaky blurs are integral – no hope for improvement unless you completely replace the parts! If I ever build a Cessna 337/O-2 again, I will give the Airfix kit a try, it can only be better…

  

Painting and markings:

The choice between the operator options from the JetRanger sheet was hard, it included Sweden and Italy, but I eventually settled for the LAPD because the livery looks cool and this police department not only operates helicopters, but also some fixed-wing aircraft.

 

I adapted the LAPD’s classic black-and-white police helicopter livery (Gloss White and Black, Humbrol 22 and 21, respectively) to the Cessna and extended it to the wings. At this point – already upset because of the poor fit of the hardware – disaster struck in the form of Humbrol’s 22 turning into a pinkish ivory upon curing! In the tin, the paint and its pigments looked pretty white and “clean”, and I assume that it’s the thinner that caused this change. What a crap! It’s probably the third tin with 22 that causes trouble, even though in different peculiarities!

The result was total rubbish, though, and I tried to rub the paint off as good as possible on the small model with its many windows, the fixed, delicate landing gear and the wing support struts. Then I overpainted the areas with Revell 301 (Semi-matt White). While this enamel yielded the intended pure white tone, the paint itself is rather gooey and not easy to work with, so that the overall finish turned out worse than desired. At least the black paint worked properly. The demarcations were created with black decal stripes (TL Modellbau), because the tiny model left little room for complex masking measures – and I did not risk any more painting accidents.

 

Since the aircraft would be kept shiny and clean, I just did a light black ink washing to emphasize surface details and did a light panel post-shading on the black areas, not for weathering but rather to accent surface structures. No further weathering was done (and necessary).

 

The markings/decals come – as mentioned above – from an Italeri 1:72 JetRanger, but they were augmented with some additional markings, e. g. grey walkways on the wings and “L-A-P-D” in large black letters under the wings, to distract from the poor finish of the white paint around them…

Finally, the kit was sealed overall with Italeri semi-gloss acrylic varnish, just with a matt anti-glare shield in front of the windscreen, which received thin white trim lines (generic decal stripes).

  

A challenging build due to the Arii kit’s rather poor basis, the massive rhinoplasty and the crisp paint scheme. However, I like the result – what-if models do not always have to be armed military vehicles, there’s potential in other genres, too. And this mono-engine “Pelican” Skymaster plays its role as a “flying eye” in police service credibly and well. However, this was my first and last Eidai kit…

Yashica Lynx, Kodachrome film photo

Former US Air Force Cessna O-2A Skymaster 68-6864 on display outside the USAF Armaments Museum at Eglin AFB, Florida

 

Based on Cessna's 337 airframe - itself their upgraded 336 but with retractable undercarriage, these twin-boom 'push-pull' machines incorporated a variety of military upgrades including lower transparent panels for greater downward visibility

 

During the Vietnam War, Skymasters were used for a number of roles - amongst them - FAC (Forward Air Control) plus PSYOPS (Psychological Ops) the latter using Loud Speakers and Leaflet dispensers

 

This one was presumably used on clandestine work with this overall black colour scheme

 

IMG_1535

U.S. Army Sgt. Thomas Becker of the 307th Military Information Support Operations Company, 10th MISO Battalion, Missouri Reserve Unit, provides security in the village of Orgun in Paktika province, Afghanistan, July 10, 2011.

Joint Combat Camera Afghanistan

Photo by Spc. George Hunt

Date Taken:07.11.2011

Location:PAKTIKA PROVINCE, AF

Related Photos: dvidshub.net/r/uyhqlr

Paratroopers line the street before the sun rises, waiting to donate their toys in hopes of receiving a winning lottery ticket for the opportunity to earn foreign jump wings at the 17th Annual Randy Oler Memorial Operation Toy Drop. The airborne operation is hosted by the U.S. Army Civil Affairs & Psychological Operations Command (Airborne), a U.S. Army Reserve operational command, Dec. 5, 2014 at Pope Field, North Carolina. Operation Toy Drop is the world’s largest combined airborne operation with seven allied partner nation paratroopers participating and allows Soldiers the opportunity to help children in need everywhere receive toys for the holidays. (U.S. Army photo by Timothy L. Hale/Released)

Cessna O-2A Skymaster.

 

Intro:

The Cessna O-2 Skymaster (nicknamed "Oscar Deuce") is a military version of the Cessna 337 Super Skymaster, used for forward air control (FAC) and psychological operations (PSYOPS) by the US military between 1967 and 2010.

  

About this creation:

I have a weak spot for odd looking aircrafts, so the Cessna 337 Skymaster with its push-pull engine configuration and twin tail-booms, has always had my interest as a model subject. I wanted it to fit my other range of aircrafts so it`s build to 1:40 scale. Major challenges for this model was: the main-wing shape and the propeller. The main wing shape is done by use of hinges inside the wing. Most of the wedge gap is covered by 1x2 tiles. I found no suitable 2 blade propeller, 7 stud dia. , in LEGOs range of propellers. For my civil Cessna 337 Super Skymaster, I made a brick-built one, just to see if it was possible, and I`m actually quite pleased with the result. For this one I have modified a 9 stud dia. two blade propeller into a 7 stud diameter. I`ve added a self-adhesive printed template onto each propeller blade and sanded off the excessive area. With this modified propeller I was also able to add a spinner.

  

About the Skymaster:

 

Crew: 1/2

 

Powerplant: two 157kw (210hp) Continental IO-360-GB flat-six piston engines.

 

Performance: max speed 336 km/h (206mph); range 2288km (1422 miles); service ceiling 5485m (18.000ft)

 

Dimensions: wingspan 11.63m (38ft 2in); length 9.07m (29ft 9in); height 2.79m (9ft 2in)

 

Weight: 2100kg (4630lb) maximum take-off weight

 

Source: The Encyclopedia of Aircraft

 

More informations about the Cessna O-2A Skymaster at Wikipedia.

 

More pictures on my Flickr

Hope you enjoy the pictures.

The Cessna O-2 Skymaster (nicknamed "Oscar Deuce") is a military version of the Cessna 337 Super Skymaster. The O-2A was used for forward air control (FAC) and the O-2B for psychological operations (PSYOPS) by the US military between 1967 and 2010.

513 O-2A's produced.

31 O-2B's produced by modifying civil C337's.

178 USAF O-2 Skymasters were lost in the Vietnam War.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessna_O-2_Skymaster

 

Cessna’s O-2TT Was Designed for Forward Air Control Missions

www.flyingmag.com/cessnas-o-2tt-was-designed-for-forward-...

 

25 Jun 2023, Andrew George commented;

"I recently acquired this aircraft and was doing research on its history. We are in the process of setting up to do the restoration on her. I am in shock that the pic I found in your collection was a clear and nice pic. Amazed it was even there! I just thought you might like to see what happened to her. She resides in Boise, Idaho and work begins this fall."

 

Photos of Cessna 0-2 Skymasters:

www.google.com/search?q=o-2+aircraft+vietnam&tbm=isch...

 

The Cessna O-2TT, joined by a flying turboprop conversion of the standard O-2 in the background.

www.flyingmag.com/cessnas-o-2tt-was-designed-for-forward-...

 

Photo: Bob Livingstone

John Scrimshaw collection

The first O-2 flew in January 1967 and the plane went into production shortly thereafter, with the USAF taking delivery in March 1967. A total of 532 O-2s were built in two variants for the USAF by 1970. The O-2A served as a FAC aircraft with the 20th Tactical Air Support Squadron, while the O-2B was equipped with loudspeakers and a leaflet dispenser for use in the psychological operations (PSYOPS) role. Several USAF O-2 aircraft were later transferred to and operated by the former VNAF South Vietnamese Air Force.[3]

 

Following the Vietnam War, the O-2 continued to operate with both U.S. Air Force and Air National Guard units well into the late 1980s. Six former USAF O-2A airframes were also transferred to the U.S. Navy in 1983 for use as "range controllers" with Attack Squadron 122 (VA-122), the Pacific Fleet Replacement Squadron for the A-7 Corsair II at Naval Air Station Lemoore, California. These same aircraft were later transferred to Strike Fighter Squadron 125 (VFA-125), the F/A-18 Hornet FRS at NAS Lemoore, in 1986 for use in the same range control role.[4]

 

The six Navy O-2A's remained in this role until September 1990, when they were replaced by T-34C Turbo Mentor aircraft transferred from the Naval Air Training Command. Four of the Navy O-2A aircraft were retired and two of these became civil registered in October 1991. These two aircraft were flown in U.S. airshows performing a "Viet Nam Warbird COIN/FAC" routine during the 1990s. The routine debuted at the "Wings Over Houston" (Texas) airshow in October 1991.[citation needed]

 

Of the six USN aircraft mentioned above, two were transferred to the U.S. Army in late 1990.[4] O-2As had originally entered the U.S. Army's inventory in 1967 from USAF stocks and were augmented by the 1990 aircraft transfer from the U.S. Navy. Several disassembled USAF O-2s remain in storage at Davis-Monthan AFB, Arizona.[4] Two O-2As were used at Laguna Army Airfield, Arizona as part of testing programs carried out by the Yuma Proving Ground. These were retired in October 2010 and sent to a museum.[1]

Yashica Lynx 14 and Kodachrome film

A French re-enactor, dressed in WWII garb, smiles for a photo during D-Day celebration at Ste. Mere Eglise, June 3. Task Force 68, which is made up of paratroopers from U.S., Germany, France, Holland, and United Kingdom, re-enacted the D-Day airborne operation on the La Fiere fields near Ste. Mere Eglise, France to commemorate the heroic acts of the WWII paratroopers who made the jump 68 years ago. After the jump, the task force marched into the town of Ste. Mere Eglise tothe sounds of cheers from the locals. Task Force 68 is in Normandy, France to commemorate the 68th anniversary of D-Day.

U.S. Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command (Airborne)

Photo by Sgt. Justin Morelli

Date Taken:06.03.2012

Location:NORMANDY, FR

Read more: www.dvidshub.net/image/593461/usacapoca-remembers-d-day#....

  

The EC-130J is a modified C-130J Super Hercules used to conduct psychological operations (PSYOP) and civil affairs broadcast missions in the standard AM, FM, HF, TV and military communications bands. Missions are flown at the maximum altitudes possible to provide optimum propagation patterns. The Commando Solo III is operated exclusively by the Air National Guard, specifically the 193rd Special Operations Wing (193rd SOW), a Pennsylvania Air National Guard unit operationally gained by the Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC). The 193rd SOW is based at the Harrisburg Air National Guard Base (formerly Olmstead AFB) at Harrisburg International Airport in Middletown, Pennsylvania.

 

In this image, an EC-130J Commando Solo III (serial number: 00-1934), call sign “Reach 1024,” climbs up to broadcast altitude. The EC-130Js participated in Operation Odyssey Dawn, warning Libyan ships to remain in port and flying jamming missions against the Islamic State in Iraq. Earlier iterations of the EC-130 include the EC-130E ABCCC (Airborne Battlefield Command and Control Center) and EC-130E Commando Solo, which entered service in 1978 with the Tactical Air Command (TAC) in 1978. The EC-130H Compass Call was an electronic warfare variant. The US Navy used EC-130G and EC-130Q, equipped with VLF transmitters, to communicate with ballistic missile submarines from 1963 to 1993.

Title: [Farewell, American Soldiers!]

Date: [1939-1945]

Extent: 13x19cm

Format: Artifacts—Leaflets

Rights Info: No known restrictions on access

Repository: Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario Canada, M5S 1A5, library.utoronto.ca/fisher

The EC-130J Commando Solo is a modified C-130J Hercules used to conduct psychological operations (PSYOP) and civil affairs broadcast missions in the standard AM, FM, HF, TV and military communications bands. Missions are flown at the maximum altitudes possible to ensure optimum propagation patterns. The EC-130J flies during either day or night scenarios with equal success, and is air-refuelable. A typical mission consists of a single-ship orbit which is offset from the desired target audience. The targets may be either military or civilian personnel. The Commando Solo is operated exclusively by the Air National Guard, specifically the 193d Special Operations Wing (193 SOW), a unit of the Pennsylvania Air National Guard operationally gained by the Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC). The 193 AOW is based at the Harrisburg Air National Guard Base (former Olmstead AFB) at Harrisburg International Airport in Middletown, Pennsylvania.

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It treats the subject lightly (it's a cartoon, you know), and if I'm not a great or even a reasonably mediocre cartoonist, I'm still better at that than I was at being a soldier, but I am proud of my service in the Army, and prouder still that I spent it in this unique outfit. From seeing "Never So Few" at the drive-in when it came out and reading (re-reading) Alistair MacLean's "Landmark Books" biography of Lawrence of Arabia in elementary school, I've had an interest in unconventional warfare since childhood, and I'm glad I got the chance to be involved in it, even if it was only on the fringes, in peacetime.

 

That's why my little bimbo in the toon isn't wearing her usual bikini or lingerie, and while they ARE a little more form-fitting than they actually were, her jungle fatigues are kind of loose and baggy. Approximately a third of the battalion was comprised of women, still WACs when I first got there in '74 and until a year or two later, when the WAC was disbanded and female officers and enlisted women were "branched" into Intelligence, Signal, Quartermaster, Transportation, Medical Service and other skill-specific branches of the service, just like the men. The ones I had the privilege of serving with were good, competent people then, and if what I read on the websites is true, there are good and competent female officers and enlisted women in PSYOP (and Civil Affairs and other UW slots) doing good work in Iraq and Afghanistan and throughout the Army today. This is the way all our wars of the forseeable future are going to be fought, whether the conventional generals like it or not, and those doing it now and those who paved the way in the past deserve all the support and respect we can give them.. I didn't want to depict them in any more demeaning fashion than a second-rate girlie cartoonist can help doing.

 

And, while the character at the right is based on the same figure I usually use, it isn't yet another self-portrait of the artist. I (and everyone else in the outfit) frequently worked WITH Special Forces, but I was never IN Special Forces--I was NOT a "green beret" (I've got a 5th Group t-shirt they gave me, so I can't say I've "been there", can't say I've "done that", but only that I "got the t-shirt"). And 4th PSYOP Group, and 8th Battalion, did have a number of SF officers and NCOs assigned. Some of you may be familiar with Jim Morris as the author of the story on which the Disney movie "Operation Dumbo Drop" was based. I never met him personally, but I know him better for "War Story", his book-length account of his experiences as an SF officer working with the Montagnards and as a PIO at 5th Group HQ in Nha Trang. On page 262 of the Dell 1985 paperback edition, in the midst of describing the Tet Offensive, he recounts a conversation with "a very good man", one Lieutenant Gordon--"a good combat man" who was going to keep getting shanghaied into admin jobs because there are a lot of good combat men but very few able administrators. I've spent years reading military history and memoirs, but that was the first and only time I've ever seen a mention of someone I personally knew, because that "Lieutenant Gordon" went on to become Captain Gordon, one of those SF officers in 8th Battalion, my boss, and my friend. My apologies for not having the skill to do a better likeness. And Tom, Barbara, Deborah or George, if by chance you see this, shoot old Gomez a Flickr mail c/o Sir Basil. Please.

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A Vietnam War safe conduct pass in my collection.

 

According to SGM Herbert A. Friedman:

 

"The United States and its allies dropped over 50 billion leaflets on Vietnam. Many of them were safe conduct passes.

 

During the Vietnam War, the United States produced a series of safe conduct passes depicting the flag of the Republic of (South) Vietnam with other allied flags, to encourage defection of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops. The passes and leaflets were produced under the jurisdiction of the Joint United States Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO)

 

The main Allied operation using such PSYOP in Vietnam was the Chieu Hoi program. It is usually translated as "Open arms." It is a combination of two verbs, "to welcome" and "to return." The program was first started by President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. Diem believed that a defector who willingly came over to the government side was more valuable that one who is taken prisoner. He encouraged the Allies to drop billions of leaflets offering amnesty to those who might rally to the government. In 1969, over 47,000 Viet Cong deserted. During the length of the war, about 160,000 enemy soldiers voluntarily came over to the Government of (South) Vietnam.

 

The United States began the aerial bombing and leafleting of Vietnam of North Vietnam in 1964, following the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Two South Vietnamese leaders are identified on the leaflets. Nguyen Cao Ky headed a military junta that assumed control in June 1965 following a series of short-lived military regimes that operated after the fall of long-time President Ngo Dinh Diem in November 1963. Nguyen Van Thieu was elected president in 1967. The process of American withdrawal and their replacement with Vietnamese troops ("Vietnamization") began in July 1969. As the American and South Vietnamese position worsened, a cease-fire was negotiated in Paris in January 1973, but it was never implemented. Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese on 30 April 1975.

 

(This) variety bears the signature and photograph of Nguyen Van Thieu. The leaflet was developed in January 1968. Nguyen Van Thieu was born on 5 April 1923, in the province of Ninh Thuan. As a young man, he briefly helped the Viet Minh fight the French colonial powers in his native province. He attended the National Military Academy in Hue and joined the French-backed Vietnamese army fighting the Viet Minh. By 1963 he was chief of staff of the Armed Forces of South Vietnam. During the confusion of the mid-1960s, when South Vietnam was wracked by coups, General Thieu became commander of the military region embracing the Mekong Delta. In June 1965, Thieu was appointed chairman of a 10-member military directorate. From there it was a short step to the presidency. He was elected in 1967, and presided over the country for eight years of the war. As the North Vietnamese armies moved south in greater numbers Thieu appealed to President Nixon for more financial aid. Nixon was sympathetic but the United States Congress was not and the move was blocked. Starved of funds, Thieu had difficulty paying the wages of his large army and desertion became a major problem. With the fall of the government to the Communist armies he fled to Taiwan in April, 1975. He died in September 2001 in Boston."

 

Much more information is available at www.psywarrior.com/VNFlagSCP.html