The Taiwan (Republic of
China) Airforce received 150 F-16A/B Block 20 aircraft in the mid 90's. They are based
at two AFBs.......... Hwa-Lien and Chia-yi AFB. The wing in Hwa-Lien has a very
interesting paint scheme with aborigine symbols for their falcon. In the
bottom shot you can see the original painting of the different types, gray-base
(below left) for general falcon and colorful sun for CAG.
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images below to see larger images
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I used Revell's F-16
MLU (#04612) for building Taiwan's Falcon. It's a nice kit for building with
a little converting for Taiwan's Falcon which is RWR antennas on the outboard
leading edge. But today, there is a better choice for building Taiwan's falcon....Revell's New "F-16C/CJ Block50/52".
This kit is so
wonderful for building any type of F-16, but Israel's F-16I.
The paint is standard
falcon paint with special decals on the vertical tail. There is no commercial
product of the special decal, so I did this by hand. At first, I searched
for
photos of the decal. Second, I drew the decal line due to 1/72 scale
along model line. Final, I used Tamiya color XF-54 and XF-1 (scale 80%:20%?
I forgot ) for painting.
I used Hasegawa's "Aircraft
Weapons" series 5 & 7 for ACMI pod, AGM-84 SLAM, and LANTIRN pods.
There is one thing for sure......Taiwan used a different LANTIRN pod which
replaced the AN/AAQ-13 Navigation pod into AN/AAQ-20 Pathfinder
Navigation pod. What's different between them? The answer is the AN/AAQ-20 is
a simple variant
of the AN/AAQ-13. Instead
of Westinghouse AN/ALQ-131 ECM pods, Taiwan chose the Raytheon AN/ALQ-184(V)7
ECM pods. The same with decals, there is no product for the 1/72 pathfinder, so
I did it by hand again.
Finally, I completed this kit.
Thanks my friend Tsai Bin-Yu for the special decal photo and "Master"
Lance for his writing support.
Cruise
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images below to see larger images
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