Furball Aero-Design 1/48 Air Wing All Stars Phantoms Part One Redux Decal First Look

By Michael Benolkin

First Look

Furball Aero-Design has reissued their F-4J/N decal super set, providing a colorful selection of CAG aircraft from selected squadrons using your choice of Academy 1/48 F-4J and F-4B/N Phantom II kits. The set was originally released for the Hasegawa kits and the design of this reissue has been tweaked to fit the differences in Academy's beautiful kits. These are all high-visibility (colorful) schemes from the 1970s before the low-visibility camouflage was adopted on US Navy and Marine Corps aircraft. You definitely have some nice options to choose from.

The examples presented here include:

1. F-4J, 153777, VF-74, AA/200, USS Forrestal, 1974
2. F-4J, 153882, VF-92, NG/200, USS Constellation, 1974
3. F-4J, 155854, VF-103, AC/200, USS Saratoga, 1977
4. F-4J, 157270, VF-114, NH/200, USS Kitty Hawk, 1973
5. F-4J, 155731, VF-142, AJ/200, USS America, 1974
6. F-4J, 155882, VF-213, NH/100, USS Kitty Hawk, 1974
7. F-4N, 152323, VMFA-531, NK/200, USS Coral Sea, 1980

The sheet is printed by Cartograf and the printing is very well done. What's more, none of these decals require the modeler to stack multiple layers of markings atop one another to recreate artwork. This trend by some other decal companies of producing multiple-layer decals is unfortunate as it puts the burden on you to do the work of what should have been done by the decal maker.

This set provides two complete sets of airframe markings to replicate at least two kits (and if you use some of the stencils from the kits, you can do more!). This set comes on one large and one medium-sized sheet and you can see that there is little wasted space in the decal printing!

My sincere thanks to Furball Aero-Design for this review sample!