Amodel 1/72 Ilyushin Il-22 Coot B Kit First Look

By Fotios Rouch

First Look

The Il-22 is a variant developed out of the Il-18, a civilian airliner design which itself goes back to the mid 50's. The Il-22M Coot-B (NATO designation) is an airborne command post and replaced the Antonov An-12VKP equivalent. Thirty Il-18Ds were converted to the Il-22M standard and were delivered to Aeroflot.

There are many different configurations as is usual with this type of aircraft function so a variety of external fairings and antennas can be seen such as the bullet fairing at the tail fin-tip, the long SLAR looking pod under the front fuselage, and many small blade antennas above and below fuselage. The hockey stick antennas on the top and bottom of the fuselage that we see in photos are not included in the kit.

The Amodel kit is the standard fair of a combination of glass fiber parts for the wings and fuselage and injected plastic for all the remaining parts. Just like with the real aircraft, Amodel designed first the Il-18 and then added all the extra parts that make the numerous variants derived from the base airframe. The quality of the glass fiber part is pretty good but it will need clean up and maybe a bit of rescribing. The front of the fuselage has fiberglass that needs to be removed and its only purpose was to aid with the molding and demolding process.

The nose of the model comes in two plastic pieces and it includes a full cockpit. I did a test fit and the plastic front fuselage fits the fiberglass pretty good but I have the suspicion that it is a bit misaligned and when I looked at it from the front it looked like the fuselage seam was maybe a degree off from the tail. Stand by on this until I start assembly and verify it.

There are numerous sprues with all the parts for the engine nacelles and landing gear as well as special sprues with parts specific to this variant. The clear parts are pretty good and lots of tinny clear parts are provided for all the navigation and landing lights. Some plastic parts do have sink marks which will need to be filled.

Amodel has improved their quality a lot but there are still areas where they can improve further. The decals include the Aeroflot livery, door outlines and a lot of stencils. Stapled to the decal sheet is also a small decal paper with three little pig heads. Interesting and not common with Russian military aircraft.

This is a pretty interesting model of an aircraft that plays an important role in the intel gathering arena and it will fill a gap in any modeler's collection of Russian aircraft. It will take some work on the modeler's part but I do not imagine that any one else is going to tackle such a subject.

I purchased my sample from Linden Hill Imports and it can also be purchased for less money from Hobbyterra for $143 which includes shipping. The model can also be purchased at Linden Hill Imports for $185 or from Squadron for $233.98.