1/72 Revell F-16A Block 20

with Sunflower Special Livery

by Cruise Wang

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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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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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Photos and text © by Cruise Wang