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Hasegawa 1/72 Sukhoi Su-33 Flanker D

By Chris Banyai-Riepl

Overview

The Sukhoi Su-27 family has quite a bit of diversity in its lineage, and the Su-33 shows just how adaptable the airframe is. Designed as a carrier-borne multirole fighter, the Su-33 features many differences from its land-based Su-27 counterpart. This includes folding wings and tailplanes, a tailhook for arrested landings, and aerial refueling capabilities. The aircraft also has canards ahead of the wing, which improves maneuverability and shortens the take-off run. As it is a dedicated ship-borne fighter, it is currently operated only by Russia, although the Chinese are reportedly developing their own equivalent for their new carrier.

The Kit

This is Hasegawa's first all-new tool 1/72 kit in a while, and it is nice to see that they continue to produce quality kits with excellent surface detailing. The kit features recessed panel lines throughout, and these are both thorough and petite. As this kit is of a Russian subject, and Hasegawa has not released (yet, anyway) a Soviet/Russian weapon set, this kit comes with a full set of stores. The decal sheet offers markings for four aircraft, and includes useful stenciling.

Looking more closely, construction starts with the interior. The kit comes with a one-piece tub that features raised detailing on the side consoles. The instrument panel is likewise detailed, and the kit comes with decals for these areas as well, which should combine with the raised detailing to produce a very nice looking interior. The seat is pretty decent out of the box as well, and only lacks seat belts. The finished tub is sandwiched between the upper and lower fuselage/wing halves, and very quickly this model is looking like a Flanker.

Like most Flanker kits, this one has separate air intake pieces. These are made up of two sides, an upper intake ramp, and a rear engine face. There are two bottom intake insert options, one with open and one with closed vents. These finished intakes fit onto the lower wing piece. This has been a fit issue spot on many other Flanker kits, so be forewarned here. Hopefully with careful dry fitting and sanding, these will fit with minimal effort.

Getting this kit on its legs, the landing gear is really nicely done. The molding on these parts is crisp and does a great job of capturing the look. The nose gear has separate oleo scissors, lights, and linkages (as well as separate wheels). The main gear is suitably beefy and also has separate wheels and linkages. The gear door interiors also have some detailing, and the result will be some very nice looking legs for your Su-33.

For weaponry, this kit comes with two types of R-27 missiles (four R-27R and two R-27ET), two R-77, four R-73, and two R-60 missiles. There are also four B-8 rocket pods. The missiles are all molded with two sets of fins in place and two separate, which makes cleanup easy and simplifies alignment. The R-77 has its rear fin piece separate, although they are molded solid. This is understandable, as these fins are very fine and are far beyond the capabilities of injection molding.

For decal choices, there are two main options: tiger or eagle. This refers to the marking on the tail, as the rest of the aircraft is pretty much identical across all four options. The Su-33 is camouflaged in a three-color upper camouflage scheme, with solid lower surfaces. The color callouts are given for Gunze paints, and even then some of the colors require mixing. The aircraft covered include Red 80 and 81 with a tiger's head on the tail, and Red 60 and 72 with an eagle on the tail. The decals are nicely printed and look very good in terms of registration and color.

Accuracy

As the Su-27 family is highly popular and highly contentious among modelers, I cannot finish this review without at least touching on the accuracy. For the most part, this is a pretty accurate Su-33. When finished, it will definitely look the part of the aircraft. That said, there are some shape issues with the kit, most notably around the spine and stinger. The stinger should be round in cross section, and the kit has the top slightly flattened. The stinger also seems to be sitting too high as it comes forward to meet up with the fuselage spine, but after looking at photos I think that it actually is at the right height and it is the upper wing area that is too flat. This is a very subtle shape and it is very difficult to ascertain just what is actually going on in this area, contour-wise. Given the complex shape and difficulties in both determining what is wrong and fixing it, this is one of those areas that is probably best left untouched. Other than that one area, I could not see anything else that stood out as wrong, so overall I can say that this is a very good kit of the Su-33.

Conclusion

While the marking options for the Su-33 are limited (and it appears that the Chinese naval Flanker is going to be based on a different Su-27 line, so this kit can't be used for one of those), this is actually one of the better Flanker kits out there. While it is unlikely, I would very much like to see Hasegawa expand on their work on this kit and produce models of other Flanker variants. My thanks to Hasegawa USA for the review sample.