Italeri 1/72 Grumman EA-6A Intruder 'Wild Weasel'

ITALERI 1:72 GRUMMAN EA-6A INTRUDER "WILD WEASEL"
'INBOX Review'

Reviewer: John Lacey (elric1965@yahoo.com.au)

Italeri’s EA-6A is one of those ‘multi version’ releases favoured by many modern manufacturer’s using a common sprue with extra parts for specific versions, thus ensuring a good mould lifetime. It depicts the ‘Electric Intruder’, an early electronic warfare variant of the original A-6A bomber.

Instructions are typically Italeri with multilingual Aircraft History, Warnings and Paint List, followed by a Parts Map, nine construction steps and finally, two single-page Painting Guides for the aircraft supplied.

The sprues are a combination of delicately scribed panel lines with raised detail where appropriate and include multi-part ejection seats, raised detail instrument panel, blanking plates with turbine faces for both the intakes and the exhausts and a myriad of optional construction sequences or parts. These include open or folded wings with simply detailed internal faces, open or closed airbrakes, extended or retracted boarding ladder, open or closed canopy, centreline and wing-mounted drop tanks, wing-mounted ALQ-99 ECM pods and, finally, AGM-45 Shrike ARMs mounted on pylons under the outer wing panels.

Decals and paint schemes are provided for two ‘hi-viz’ Intruders both with Gull Grey uppers and sides and white lowers in addition to ‘Radome Tan’ radomes. From a painting point of view, the first scheme has White sides to it’s fin-mounted radome, whereas the second’s radome is Gull Grey. In both cases, decals are provided for the spine and wingroot walkways, in addition to the low voltage ‘slime lights’ formation lights which are haute de riguer for every USN and USMC jet. Options are for a US Navy EA-6A of VAQ-33 in 1980, I believe this is the USN’s ‘ECM aggressor’ squadron and for my personal favourite, VMAQ-2 ‘Playboys’ who transitioned from EF-10B Skyknights, through to EA-6As and finally EA-6B Prowlers.

References should be checked here regarding the carriage of Shrikes on early ‘hi-viz’ machines. I believe that later ‘low-viz’ grey machines were seen carrying them, but I have no references showing earlier machines carrying this weapon. I know that during the Vietnam war A-6B Intruders, modified for the ‘Iron Hand’ defence suppression mission (the USN’s Wild Weasels’), carried AGM-78 Standard ARMs and the later EA-6Bs carried AGM-88 HARMs.

In conclusion, a very nicely detailed kit of an early electronic warfare platform with potential for after market decal conversions to later airframes serving with Reserve squadrons in modern USN TPS (Tactical Paint Scheme).

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