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Condor 1/72 A-36A Apache

By Chris Banyai-Riepl

It seems that just about every kit manufacturer in the world has a kit of the P-51D Mustang, but very few have actually done a kit of the Mustang's humble beginning, the A-36A Apache. In fact, there are only two injection-molded 1/72 kits of this plane, the first by Model News and this one from Condor.

Condor hails from the same area as MPM and Special Hobby, so if you are familiar with their kits, you have a good idea as to what this kit is like. Once you get past the rather impressive boxart, you will find plenty of parts inside. The moldings are relatively flash-free and very well done. While the boxart shows the wing dive brakes open, on the kit they are molded closed, and the detail in them is very nice. The wheel wells look like wheels would actually fit in them.

The fuselage is well detailed as well, with a fairly decent cockpit inside. It could definitely do with a resin update set, though. One nice thing about the fuselage and canopy is that the rear quarter windows are not separate pieces, but rather the whole rear section of the turtledeck that holds those windows is clear. This means that you won't have to worry about trying to fit those odd-shaped pieces in, and you can guarantee a nice smooth fit of the canopy to the fuselage. The canopy is one piece, and while it is fairly thin, there is some distortion in the plastic. If you decide to superdetail the cockpit, you might want to make a vacuform copy so that the detail inside could be seen.

The rest of the kit is cleanly molded, and it looks like it will go together fairly quickly.
Armament consists of the guns and a pair of bombs. There are two decal options, both finished in olive drab over neutral gray. The decals are printed by Propagteam and are very thin. The original sheet has the stars-n-bars the wrong color, so Propagteam included a second corrected sheet that has the proper colors. Both Condor and Propagteam are to be commended on this, especially since finding properly colored stars-n-bars for this kit would be very difficult!

While this kit isn't a one-hour throw-together type of kit, it does fill an empty spot in the Mustang lineage and the results you get from this kit will far surpass those that you would get trying to convert the old Frog Mustang Mk. IA. If you are interested in the Mustang family, definitely get this kit. It will be worth it.