Airfix SA-341 Gazelle

The Aerospatiale Gazelle is a French light transport, light attack scout helicopter. It is licensed for manufacture by Westland for the British military. The two companies shared development and production work, introducing the Gazelle in 1973. Easy to maintain and fly, it has been a wildly successful aircraft, seeing use by all branches of the French and British militaries and several foreign governments. It was the first helicopter to introduce the fenestron — the enclosed tail rotor — which is less susceptible to damage and more efficient at higher speeds than conventional tail rotors.

The Kit

I believe Airfix has the only tooling of this aircraft in 1/72 scale. Heller reboxed the Airfix mold with some additional weaponry, but this is it folks. And it stands to reason: what mentally healthy person wants to build a Gazelle in 1/72 scale? I don't think there are any.

The kit comprises 34 pieces in gray styrene and 6 clear parts. There is raised rivet and panel detail. I supplemented with the Brengun PE detail set which was hit or miss. The rotor assembly looked totally wrong and the control sticks were tiny. The rest of the details were nice, including the iconic, comically large homing radar antennae on the nose of the craft. Though such a diminutive model, I figured a detail set might give you proportionately more bang for your buck than with a larger, more complex kit. And, since the Gazelle has an almost fully-glass canopy and the detail kit lots of cockpit bells and whistles, I figured it was worth it. Incidentally, I did not use the rotor assembly as it was, but tried to modify it to an acceptable degree. Also, the spot for the rotor was too shallow: there was no hole there, just a slight depression, and the base of the rotor sat flush with the fuselage. This looked really poor to me, so I drilled out the hole for the rotor completely:

Then I was able to set the rotor down a bit inside the hole to give the thing some depth:

Assembly was fine; nothing egregious. The major issue is that the instructions don't call for any ballast, but boy is it needed. Sadly, there simply isn't room for it: I purchased a variety of tungsten shot and stuffed it into all the nooks and crannies I could find but this model shrugged them off. Indeed, the tail is looooong.

The instructions use Humbrol colors, but I had on hand (and the internet said were “equivalent”) Mr. Color 307 gray and 303 green for the camouflage.

Decals went down well, though many were printed slightly off-center, with a slight edge of white showing here and there. I caught onto this, but not before a couple decals were already settled in place.

I gave the model an enamel wash with AK 2071, allowing it to dray completely before lightly cleaning it up so that it could settle around the various raised details. Finished with Alclad Klear Kote Matte. Now I just need to figure out how to display this thing without it tipping backwards onto its tail!