CollectAire 1/48 MiG-31BM Foxhound Kit First Look

By Fotios Rouch

First Look

The Foxhound is one of the coolest if not THE coolest interceptor that ever came out of the old Soviet Union . It came out as a natural evolution to the MiG-25 which is great in its own right. The Foxhound can fly supersonic at low altitude, has longer range, very interesting digital avionics that allow it to track up to ten targets and is made out of cool metals (nickel-steel, titanium, etc).

Like its brothers it has a landing gear that permits it to land in semi-unprepared runways. It can carry numerous types of missiles, Amos, Aphid, Acrid and it has a six-barrel 23 mm gun inside a fairing on the starboard side of the fuselage. This aircraft is admired by all the ex Soviet Air Force fans. The only problem is that we never had a real quarter scale model of it.

Collect-Aire had announced that a kit of the Foxhound was going to be made for some years now. The release of the kit was delayed many times but we finally have it. I received my copy a few days ago neatly packed in the usual yellow and bulletproof box.

The kit was designed by the LF team in the Czech Republic . The LF stamp is noticeable on the photo-etch fret as well. This same team also released the Su-24 some years ago. Unlike the Fencer, the Foxhound is being molded in the US .

The parts were packed inside different zip-lock bags and none were warped or broken due to transportation.

So what do we get in the box. We get a fuselage broken down in four parts with a left/right front fuselage plug and a left/right main body. I have to say that cutting the fuselage in this conventional manner helped a lot with preventing warping problems. The wings are single piece castings and were very straight in my example. The engraving on the fuselage and wings is very light and matches the scale plans the makers used.

The cockpit is reasonably well detailed. You get two K-36DM ejection seats, photo-etch for all the sidewalls and the instrumentation that includes paper instrument faces and soft metal parts for some other details. The canopies are separate from the fuselage and have quilting detail molded on their inner surfaces.

The landing gear legs are made out of metal and look very sturdy. The wheels look ok. The front landing gear includes a resin piece for the ribbed mudguard.

The intakes look good but work will be required on the modeler's part if they want to show proper depth and engine faceplates.

The kit contains, Aphid, Amos and Kilter missiles with detail provided by photo-etch parts.

Five different Foxhounds are shown on the decal instruction and a lot of numbers are provided to do different aircraft as well.

The instructions are a departure from the usual Collect-Aire instructions. They provide a lot of small scrap views and text detail for detailing and building the model.

In conclusion, this appears to be a nice model in the box. Building it and seeing how it compares to the real MiG-31 will be a chapter for another day. For now, I will be thinking of all the cool articles and stories I read about the Foxhound and the nice color scheme that I will have to choose for my model.