PJ Productions

1/72 French High-Altitude Pilots

Stock Number: 721122

Reviewed By  Jim Pearsall, IPMS# 2209

MSRP: $5.99 (€4.20 Euros ) Website: www.pjproduction.net Once again PJ Productions has released a great set of pilots, this time for "French High Altitude". You get two figures in the set, both beautifully cast from resin, with both right and left arms separate in this set. The two separate arms came in handy, as it turns out I needed both figures for my project, and being able to put them in slightly different poses meant they didn’t look like posed manikins or robots. When I started this project, I decided that I’d like to put one of them in a Mirage III. I have a Swiss Mirage IIIS on the shelf, and thought one of these guys would look really good in that cockpit. Unfortunately, the Revell ejection seat is narrower than the pilot’s seat. He wouldn’t fit. Plan B starts in a few moments. In the mid-90s, I was at 5ATAF Headquarters in Italy, which had operational control over NATO air operations in Bosnia. There was a French contingent on site, and I was glad they were there, because the US hadn’t developed recce pods for the F-14, F-16 or F/A-18 yet, and we had no "air breathing" reconnaissance aircraft except for Canberra PR9s and Mirage IVPs. And that’s the basis for "Plan B". I recently bought the Aires photo pod for the Heller Mirage IV. I have 2 figures, and those figures fit the Heller seats. The Mirage IV has a ceiling of 20,000 meters, or about 66,000 feet. That may not be U-2 or SR-71 height, but it’s definitely high altitude, and these are the guys for the job. I dressed up the Heller cockpit with decals for the instrument panels and a little paint on the seats but it’s the figures that will be most noticeable when the Mirage IVP is complete. As you can see, I painted the helmets silver. You can see a silver helmet peeking out of the Mirage IV picture here. I kept the khaki uniforms, but went with military green seat belts, as seen on "the ejection site". I thought the brown gloves would add something to the mix, more so than black or Nomex green. The faces were just painted flesh, with some dark brown acrylic added to bring out highlights. It looks like the figures have some sort of clipboard on each leg, so I added a flight plan for the pilot and a map for the back-seater. As far as difficulty in removing from the sprue or assembly, there just wasn’t any. The men attach through the soles of their boots, and cutting them off with a fine razor saw is the work of moments. One of them was broken off the sprue when I received the figures, but the feet are hidden under the panels in the Mirage IV, so even my botched repair job is well hidden. The arms cut easily off the connector, and there has been some thought given to where they connect. The back of the arms is hard to see in the cockpit, so it’s less imperative to do a really great job of cleanup to get a good looking figure. Another commendable feature is that the two figures are not looking in the same direction. In my cockpit, the pilot is looking straight ahead; the back-seater is looking slightly to the left. One problem I ran into was that the pilot’s legs are too close together to allow the Heller control column to fit. I made a new stick from tag wire. I used Gator Glue to attach the arms to the figures. The pilot has his right hand on the stick, and his left is down there where the throttle should be, if there was one in this cockpit. The GIB is checking his map, and has both hands down. I started out with him adjusting something on his panel, but the pose looked too much like the pilot’s, so I moved that arm down. That’s the nice thing about working with glue that takes a few minutes to set. Now the cockpit assembly is ready to put inside the fuselage. I found a flyer in the Heller Mirage IV kit that announced their new kits for 1977. I would guess that’s about when the kit was produced. The cockpit does need a lot of dressing up to catch up to 30 years of progress in model design. Nevertheless, the fit of the kit is good, and with these figures as points of interest, it’ll be a fine addition to my shelf. My thanks go out to PJ Productions and I highly recommend these pilots. And a last note. One evening I went over to the French compound at 5ATAF to buy a patch. Because the French were not in NATO, they weren’t participating in Operation Deny Flight, they were there for Operation Crecerelle, and they had their own patch, which they sold as a souvenir. I can now tell you from experience that Rap music in French is just as bad as it is in English.