Anigrand Craftswork 1/72 Douglas D-558-2 Skyrocket By Jim Schubert

History

In the autumn of 1944 the US Navy ordered six straight-wing jet planes from Douglas to study the transonic flight regime. These were designated D-558-1 Skystreak. At the second mockup review in August 1945 the Navy and NACA asked Douglas to study the application of swept wings to the Skystreak to expand the study into the supersonic fight regime. The contract was duly amended to call for three Phase One straight-wing D-558-1 Skystreaks and three Phase Two D-558-2 Skyrockets, which were to be fitted with a turbo-jet engine for take off and climb and a rocket engine to be fired for high speed research. The first -2 flight occurred on February 4, 1948 at Muroc Air Base (now Edwards) where the D-558-1 and Bell XS-1were already flying. Early flights were made on the turbo-jet alone, as the rocket engine was not yet ready. Testing continued with jet power until the rocket became available. This proved unsatisfactory because the rate of climb on the jet was so slow that there was insufficient fuel left to support meaningful high speed flight time at high altitude. To extend the duration of high speed flight the jet engine was deleted and its space given over to fuel and oxidizer for the rocket. In this configuration the Skyrocket was carried aloft by a Boeing B-29 mother-plane.

In 1954, the Navy ordered Douglas to expand the program to a Phase three with the building of the D-558-3 Skyflash, which was intended to fly as high as 700,000 feet and to reach speeds up to Mach 9 but this phase of the program was cancelled and its funding was redirected to the X-15 project.

Unusually, for X-planes, all three Skyrockets survive:

• BuNo 37973 in The Planes of Fame Museum, Chino, California.

• BuNo 37974 in the National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC.

• BuNo 37975 on a pylon at Antelope Valley College, Palmdale, California.

The Kit

This is my first exposure to an Anigrand kit. Anigrand Craftsworks is based in Hong Kong and produces kits of a great variety of very unusual subjects in 1/72 scale. Take a look at their web site at https://www.anigrand.com and be amazed at the goods on offer. This kit arrived in a small, very stout box that protects its contents quite well. It’s a pretty simple kit comprising only 19 resin parts, one vac canopy and a small, lamentably incomplete, decal sheet and one sheet of instructions. If you are going to build this kit you really should obtain a copy of the Ginter book noted below as it is, indeed, a one- source reference with everything you’ll need and it’s a good read too.

The instruction sheet includes, on one side, a brief history, specifications, a photo and an exploded drawing of the kit; the other side displays a three-view colors and markings guide for the first of the three Skyrockets. The parts are well cast in the usual pale cream colored resin. The surface development of the fuselage belies is origins from a hand-carved wood master and a little block sanding is required, by the model builder, to render the surface truly fair. I’ve the impression, reinforced by enlarging a straight-on side view photo to 1/72, that the cockpit fairing and hood are a bit too high vertically and a bit too short horizontally. This is easily corrected by shaving down the crown of the fairing, extending it aft a bit with filler and trimming the vac canopy to sit a little lower. Another problem in this area is that the leading edge of the windscreen should be knife-edged but the kit part isn’t. This is due to the fact that sharp edges and creases cannot be executed with the vac forming process. My solution, used on my old Meikraft D-558-1 Skystreak, was to make a new windscreen center post from a piece of sheet lead salvaged from a wine bottle neck and bent over the sharp edge of a #11 Xacto blade. This was glued in place, trimmed, filled and filed to fit. You could also try making a new windscreen of two pieces of clear sheet stock but this seems more fiddly to me.

A nice touch with this kit is the provision of assembly pegs for the wing/fuselage and tailplane/fuselage joints. This is a very rare feature for resin kits.

The sharp, well printed decals are a bit of a disappointment in that by doing the D-558-1, -2 & -3 all on one small sheet the markings are inadequate for all three models. Only the first plane, BuNo 37973, is provided for at only one specific moment in its life. None of the myriad stenciled instructions scattered about the plane are included. These add a great deal to the visual “surface texture” of a model and their absence, in my opinion, diminishes the final model. The stencils can, of course, be scrounged from your spares but shouldn’t have to be.

Conclusion

This is a good, but not perfect, kit of an historically significant subject, which has been largely ignored by makers of 1/72 kits. The only other offering in 1/72 scale of which I’m aware was the very old, one-piece Czech Master Resin kit. Revell did a box-scale, injection molded kit back in 1954 that was about 1/70 scale; don’t bother with it unless you’re a kit collector. Collect-Aire offers a very nice resin kit of the Skyrocket in 1/48 scale. I know of no other kits of this plane. Anigrand also offers kits of the Skystreak and Skyflash in case you are moved to model the whole family. Kudos to Anigrand for kitting this needed subject. Now, how about a kit of the Bell X-1E and also one for the X-1A series?

My kit was purchased directly from Anigrand for about US$30 plus shipping from Hong Kong to Seattle.

Main Reference

• Douglas D-558-2 Skyrocket, naval Fighters Number Fifty Seven: Scott Libis, Steve Ginter Publications, USA, 2002, ISBN 0942612-332-9.

Other Potentially Useful References

• Airpower magazine, Vol. 15, No. 5, September 1985.

• Air & Space magazine, June/July 2001.

• Douglas Service magazine, Second Quarter 1983.

• IPMS/USA Modelers’ Journal Vol. 10, Nos. 1 & 2, Dec./Nov. 1997 & Jan./Feb. 1998.