About the aircraft: The A-4E Skyhawk was a single-engined carrier-based light attack aircraft. Versions of the Skyhawk had an extremely long career with the U.S. Navy starting in the late 'fifties and ending in 2003. Many A-4E Skyhaws were used by the U.S. Navy as light-attack aircraft during the Vietnam war, until replaced by the A-7 Corsair II. Quite a few A-4Es found a second life as adversary aircraft, used in air-combat training. Stripped of the equipment associated with their bombing role, painted in fancy camouflage colours, and flown by highly experienced pilots, in close combat these nimble little jets could teach an aspiring Phantom or Tomcat pilot a few new tricks. This particular aircraft carries the camouflage markings of VF-171 'Aces', Det. Key West in 1978. At that time VF-171 was the U.S. Navy's F-4 Phantom II training squadron. It operated a small detachment of aircraft from Naval Air Station Key West in Florida, where the trainee pilots could benefit from generally excellent flying weather. Alongside larger numbers of F-4s this detachment also operated three A-4Es as adversary aircraft. About the build: Though at a first glance, camouflage might seem like a pretty easy thing to do, sadly it isn't. It takes a great deal of effort and LEGO to make sure that the overall colourscheme doesn't become too patchy. I'm not too pleased with the end result. In any case, the standard LEGo blue is a bit bright for the actual aircraft. The shape of this aircraft was hard to get right. Initially I couldn't get the shape of the nose and cockpit canopy to look right. Actually, the only way I saw to provide a somewhat satisfactory windscreen was by getting creative with some transparent plastic and coloured paper. The gentle tapering of the fuselage aft of the jet intakes proved quite a few amusing hours (it goes from 9-wide at the intakes to 4-wide at the exhaust). As allways, the retractable landing gear gave me quite a bit of trouble. The room for the nose-gear is very limited and the main wheels fold flat into the wings. The result of this in my model is that the doors covering the wheels on the main gear are somewhat large and consequently the bulges that are visible under the wing when the wheels are retracted are too pronounced. As originally built, the model had an annoying tendency to tip onto its tail, which I resolved by putting a piece of lead in the fuselage just behind the cockpit. Of course, the cockpit canopy can be opened. I built the aircraft in late 2004. In late 2005 it underwent a major upgrade. After having bought a Titan XP set I realised that it might offer enough blue-grey parts to replace the regular blue on the Skyhawk. Furthermore I replaced all the old dark grey with new (blueish) dark grey (a.k.a. dark bley). The overall look now is far more realistic than it used to be.