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Trumpeter 1/72 Chinese J-20 Mighty Dragon

By Chris Banyai-Riepl

Overview

The third nation to develop a fifth generation stealth fighter aircraft (after the United States and Russia), China's Chengdu J-20 "Mighty Dragon" took to the skies in January 2011 and is currently undergoing flight tests. Reading about this aircraft reveals a long list of possibilities, and the Wikipedia article is resplendent with qualifiers such as "may", "might have", and "could be". While visually known from photographs and videos published online, its actual performance and even its mission remains unknown. Still, the Wikipedia article makes for some interesting reading, so for inspiration, be sure to check it out.

The Kit

Trumpeter's kit of the J-20 is rather surprising, given how new the aircraft is. Thanks to the Internet, though, this aircraft has been very well covered, enough so that Trumpeter felt confident to produce a kit of the type. As Trumpeter is a Chinese company, producing a model of a new Chinese stealth fighter, one must wonder as to just what influences might have come into play, but a quick glance shows that this kit does a pretty good job of capturing the look of the J-20. It comes in black, gray, and white plastic, with a small clear sprue providing the canopy and other details. The decal sheet provides markings for one prototype aircraft.

Construction begins in this kit with the cockpit. This kit comes with a nicely detailed seat, complete with separate seat cushion, pull handle, and photoetch seatbelts. The finished seat fits into a one-piece tub that has nice raised detailing on the sidewalls, along with separate control stick and throttle quadrant. The instrument panel also features raised detailing, and decals are included for both the panel and the sidewall consoles, should you wish to use those instead. The instrument panel fits into a one-piece hood, and the completed assembly will make for a nice and busy front office. That's the good side; the bad is we really don't know what the cockpit looks like, so all of this detailing is pretty much conjecture.

The nose gear well is built up from five pieces for the main box, with an additional box for the actuator arm. The nose gear leg itself is very nicely done, with separate oleo scissors and even clear lights. The nose wheel gets a separate hub, which will make it very easy to paint. In fact, the entire layout of the kit parts suggest that one could build this without any paint at all. The cockpit parts are done in both black and gray, the wheel wells are done in white, with the main exterior parts done in black. This is an interesting method, similar to what Matchbox did ages ago. If nothing else, it will make it easier to paint the wheel wells, as white paint on black plastic is a real pain.

The forward fuselage assembly is somewhat complex, due to the odd shapes involved. There are large intake bumps that make a top-bottom assembly difficult. So this kit has the lower forward fuselage split into right and left halves, which then meets up with the one-piece upper fuselage. This could be an area of fit issues, so I would recommend holding off the assembly here until you have the main fuselage together.

Speaking of which, the main lower fuselage piece gets some really nice interior structure. First off, there are full intake ducts that run back to the main wheel well box. This box has a front and rear bulkhead, with the inner side built up from three additional pieces. All of this, coupled with the molded-in detail in the upper fuselage, will result in a very busy wheel well. This is good, as with the doors open this is a very prominent area on the J-20 and offers a nice break to the generally smooth and flowing curves of the aircraft.

For the upper fuselage, there is a box on the rear end that provides the parachute pack in the deployed position. The forward fuselage assembly traps the cockpit tub and nose wheel well into a tight arrangement, and there are decals provided for the wheel well detail spot (again, a nod to the no-paint feature of this kit). With all that in place, the lower rear fuselage can be added, and with the addition of the vertical fins and canards, this kit is pretty much done. It really is a simple model, and even with painting it could easily be done in a week.

For the decals, the kit comes with the one prototype aircraft, 2001. What is interesting, as already mentioned, is the fact that this kit provides decals for just about everything, so there is no need to paint it. For exterior details, there are decals for various panels done in black, and the exhaust pipes are covered with silver decal. The wingtip lights are also covered, with green and red decals provided. In addition to all these basic markings, the kit also comes with a few stencils as well as the national markings. The decals are nicely printed and have a matte finish.

But Is It Accurate?

A Chinese stealth fighter model produced by a Chinese model company, it just seems like they would have a lot of pressure, both official and unofficial, to skew the kit's shape and make it as inaccurate as possible. However, at first glance, I would say that Trumpeter did a very good job on this kit, accuracy-wise. All we have to go on are the handful of photographs that have showed up online, and one of the better collections I came across while researching this kit can be found here, on this Pakistani Defense forum page. In looking at these photos, it looks like the kit is pretty darn good on the front end. About the only real complaint I can see is that Trumpeter has made the corners too sharp. For example, where the canards meet up to the intake, this kit has a sharp corner, but it looks like the actual aircraft has a bit of a fillet there, creating more of a smooth blend. This is easy to fix, though, with just a bit of filler rounded in.

The rear fuselage seems to have the majority of the problems in terms of shape. Most of these are subtle, and realistically, could probably just be ignored as they will be difficult to fix. I'll toss them out here, though, for those who are so inclined, and take it all with a grain of salt, as I don't have detailed information or photographs to really confirm my suppositions.

With that said, the first thing I noticed was that the trough between the engines on the fuselage underside was not long enough. Further examination of this area revealed that the flat fuselage underside should actually extend much further after, nearly to the exhaust nozzle itself. That, coupled with the longer trough, creates a very different shape on the lower rear fuselage. Flipping the kit over, it would appear that the trough needs to extend a bit more on the upper fuselage as well, but not nearly as much as on the lower fuselage. This can be seen in the photos that show the hatch over the parachute housing to have more of a curve to it than the kit depicts.

The third thing I noticed was that the extensions on either side of the exhaust nozzles should have more of an angle as they move away from the exhausts. It was this last item that got me looking at the overall geometry of the rear fuselage, and I came to a couple of possible conclusions. The first one is that the vertical fins should be moved further out from the fuselage, which would increase the span of the wings and change the shape of the lower fuselage. Further inspection of photos from other angles tends to show that, while that is true to an extent, there also needs to be a slight expansion in the center as well. However, the proportions of the forward fuselage appear right, so it gets complicated as to just what exactly is going on with the rear fuselage.

For me, all of this is purely a visual exercise, as I will build this kit OOB and not worry about these discrepancies. The challenges involved in correcting them far outweigh my desire to have an accurate J-20 on the shelf, and in the end the finished model will build into a fairly good rendition of the aircraft. Given the origins of the kit, this is high praise indeed.

Conclusion

Despite the subtle shape issues on the rear end, this is a nice kit overall. The big question remains, though, as to whether this is a prototype aircraft, pre-production aircraft, or just a technology demonstrator, and the answer to that question will determine just how much longevity this tooling as. I'm personally hoping that it is close to a production example and that we'll see it finished in some interesting camouflages from air forces around the world. My thanks to Stevens International for the review sample.