Messerschmitt Me 262A-1a/U4 "Schwalbe"

Kit:	Hasegawa (standard Me 262A-1a) + MPM (Me 262A-1a/U4), 1/72nd; both kits were bought in 2008-2009 for about $10 each. Model finished on 2023-12-31.
Aircraft:	"Wilma Jeanne" / "V083", W.Nr. 170083, 54th Air Disarmament Squadron, US Army Air Corps, June 1944 in Melun, France

The Messerschmitt Me 262 was the world's first operational jet fighter. The Me 262A-1a/U4 -variant was an experimental version equipped with a 50 mm Rheimetall-Mauser MK 214 A cannon in the nose, replacing the standard 30 mm cannons. This scale model depicts W.Nr. 170083, the second example of only two that were built, after its capture in June 1944 and assignment to the 54th Air Disarmament Squadron of the US Army Air Corps. The aircraft was named "Wilma Jeanne" by MSgt (?) Eugene E. Freiburger [4]. Later, the aircraft was transferred to the Air Technical Intelligence team (nicknamed "Watson's Whizzers" after the unit's commander, Col. Harold E. Watson) and renamed "Happy Hunter II". The aircraft was destroyed during a ferry flight from Melun to Cherbourg.

Construction Notes

The short story is this: The MPM kit is rather primitive but has the right nose for the cannon-equipped version; the Hasegawa kit is well detailed and nice, and easy to build. So the solution is to graft the MPM nose onto the Hasegawa airframe, and scratch-build any necessary missing details. Luckily both kits are accurate, so the new nose fits the Hasegawa kit perfectly. It turns the new nose also makes it easier to add weight (this aircraft has a tricycle landing gear), since this can happen before the nose is grafted onto the rest of the fuselage.

The MPM kit comes with several sheets of photo-etch detail parts, some of which I used in the cockpit and the nose landing gear. All landing gear doors were cut from 5 thou styrene sheet and laminated (two layers) to imitate the original, stiffened structure. The nose wheel well was built from scratch, but using the front part of the original well; in this variant of the Me 262, there was no room for the nose gear to simply retract backwards, instead the nose wheel had to rotate 90 degrees to fit flat under the massive cannon.

The barrel of the MK 214A cannon that comes with the MPM kit is rather terrible, so I fashioned a new one from sections of Albion Alloys' brass tubes of various diameters and some Evergreen styrene tube. Not only is the result better looking, but it is also stronger; I think you could almost lift the model up from the barrel.

The canopy comes in three parts and fits reasonably well. Note that if you leave the canopy open, you are advised to paint the parts before attaching them, because this way they are much easier to mask. Trust me on this one (or, as they say, "good judgement comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgement"). Also note that despite what the drawings in [9, 10] seem to suggest, this aircraft did not have the armored headrest, evident from photographs. [6] also gets this wrong.

The directional loop antenna and the FuG 25A whip antenna came from the spares box (I think they were from some Bf 109G kits). From all the photographs I found of this individual aircraft, I cannot tell whether it had an antenna wire between the canopy and the top of the vertical tail. I won't add one until I find some more information; I imagine it could have been removed, damaged, etc.

Plastic rod/tube helped align jet engine parts.

Cockpit ready for fuselage halves to be closed. Eduard seatbelts, and photo-etch instrument panel from the MPM kit.

New wheel well.

Wheel well completed.

MPM nose grafted onto the Hasegawa fuselage.

Ready for primer paint.

New wheel well doors cut with a Cricut cutter.

Assembled wheel well doors. Later I realized that I had made the nose gear doors as mirror images, and had to cut new ones.

Camouflage and Markings

Before late November 1944 the standard Me 262 camouflage was the same RLM 74/75/76 pattern that was used on aircraft like the Bf 109. After that, the standard pattern was RLM 81/82/76 [16]. In both cases, horizontal surfaces had a splinter pattern, and a random mottle pattern was added to vertical surfaces. The case for Me 262 colors is not quite that straightforward, however, for several reasons: Field-applied paint (new camouflage patterns, or minimally, patches) was common. Also, there are many "colorized" photos of these aircraft circulating; those colors only represent the guesses/imagination of whoever edited the photos, and should not be used as a reference.

For this particular aircraft, some sources suggest that only RLM 81 (or possibly only RLM 82) was used on upper surfaces; see [6 p.26, 9 p.281]. I have a hard time believing this, because I don't know why there would have been such a drastic deviation from the standard pattern; and also, many photographs of this particular aircraft clearly show two different colors on the fuselage. For this reason I decided to go with the standard late-war pattern. Note that the confusion about the late-war RLM green colors that I reported on earlier applies here as well. So essentially I first sprayed the surfaces the same way I did for my Dornier Do 335 (the difference being that the Dornier's undersides are RLM 65, not RLM 76): MrColor #121 and #122 for the greens, #117 for the light blue. Mottle pattern was sprayed with very thin paints and low pressure, maybe 10 psi. It is advisable to have pictures of the aircraft easily viewable when spraying the mottle pattern to get more accurate details; I use an iPad mounted right next to my spray booth for this purpose.

I painted the cannon barrel with two different Alclad II colors. In photographs it looks like the muzzle brake was covered with something, so I painted it white.

I painted most of the markings, after cutting masks. When the aircraft was taken over by the Americans, some of the German markings were overpainted; I made masks for these, and discovered that the Adobe Illustrator effect "Distort & Transform/Roughen" can conveniently be used to produce a rough, handpainted edge. Some overpainting was finished with a little bit of freehand airbrushing. Decals were home-made (the "Wilma Jeanne" text and the tactical number, printed on a laser printer with a Ghost white toner cartridge), from the Haswegawa sheet (stencils), and from EagleCals' P-51D sheet (stars & bars). Based on photographs, not all the stencils Hasegawa's sheet gives you were there.

I did some weathering using Mr.Color Aluminum (for chipped paint) and AK Interactive Engine Oil and Earth Effects (for stains). The model was finished by first spraying with Alclad Gloss Klear Kote (which I had also applied before decals) and finally with my usual mixture of Testors' Dullcote and Glosscote.

Masked for RLM 81.

Splinter camouflage is ready.

Mottle pattern applied. The cannon barrel has not been painted yet.

Masked for markings.

Basic markings are ready.

First white decals applied. It is hard to overexaggerate how excited I was at this point in the project.

P.S. I printed a lot of extra white decals... contact me if you are interested.

References Used

I have over 100 books and articles in my library describing the Me 262. Below is a list of the essential references I used in this project. A few notes about some of these: [1, 2, 3, 16] are indispensable sources of information for any WW2 German aircraft project, and I use them all the time; [7, 8] offer a lot of detail information, to the level beyond what is necessary in 1/72nd scale aircraft; [9, 10] are part of a four-volume set that more or less has everything you ever wanted to know about Me 262s, and [10] also has a great coverage of captured aircraft in new owners' markings. [5, 11] have some additional pictures of the individual aircraft my model depicts.

Cockpits deutscher Flugzeuge - Historische Instrumentierungen von 1911-1970 (Cohausz); Aviatic Verlag 2000
German Aircraft Interiors 1935-1945, Vol.1 (Merrick); Monogram Aviation Publications 1996
German Aircraft Landing Gear (Sengfelder); Schiffer 1995
German Jet Aces of World War 2 (Morgan & Weal); Osprey Aircraft of the Aces 17; Osprey 1998
German Jets 1944-1945 (Griehl); Luftwaffe at War 10; Greenhill Books 1999
"Heavy-hitting Swallow" (Johnson), Airfix Model World May 2011
Luftfahrt International Nr. 13 (Jan/Febr 1976)
Luftfahrt International Nr. 14 (März/April 1976)
Me 262 volume 2 (Smith & Creek); Classic Publications 1998
Me 262 volume 4 (Smith & Creek); Classic Publications 2000
Messerschmitt 262 (Hirsch & Feist); Aero Series 14; Aero Publishers 1967
Messerschmitt Me 262; Koku-fan / Famous Airplanes of the World 17; Bunrin-do, Tokyo (Japan) 1971
Messerschmitt Me 262 - Arrow to the Future (Boyne); Schiffer 1994
Messerschmitt Me 262 described, part 1 (Merrick); Kookaburra Technical Manual 1/6; Kookaburra Technical Publications 1972
Messerschmitt Me 262 Sturmvogel (Jenkins); Warbird Tech Series 6; Specialty Press 1996
Official Monogram Painting Guide to German Aircraft 1935-1945 (Merrick & Hitchcock); Monogram Aviation Publications 1980

I saw this picture in [12] when I was a teenager and thought "I absolutely must build a model of that!" Since then I have found many more pictures of this particular aircraft.