Aircraft Colors ?

Olive Drab. B-17s were built in either Olive Drab 41 over Neutral Gray 43, or Natural Metal, depending upon when they were built, with a handful of excpetions. A few B-17Ds & Es were built in RAF colors, or camouflaged at depots.

Ken, are these pics you have photo's of the real thing or colour plates.

Bish

Ken, are these pics you have photo's of the real thing or colour plates.

I'm looking at the page below and they are the real thing, but you can see ia ton of photos if you go to Google images

Even these photos look different, It's probably the way the sun hits it. But that makes it harder to see which color it really was / is

http://www.air-and-space.com/200705%20Collings%20Bombers%20static.htm

Right, I see now. I was going to say that if they were wartime pics, it could be an effect of the colour film being used. But I can see the problem. One thing I do notice is in the top pic, the stark contrast between the B-17 and the other two, they are a lot darker and clearly OD. Some one is bound to know more about the recent history of these aircraft. Two possibility's that springs to my mind is that either the B-17's paint is much older and has faded more. I would imagine Cal is some what hotter and more importantly sunnier than jolly old England. the other possibility is that they have simply used the wrong colour paint.

Just a thought. But I am sure someone else will know better.

The original "909", B-17G-30-BO, serial no. 42-31909 was delivered to the USAAF in 1943 and was one of the last aircraft of that type painted Olive Drab over Neutral Gray.

The Collings fort was built as B-17G-85-DL serial no. 44-83575 delivered to the USAAF in 1945 in NMF.

Anyways this is all on Wiki so I'll stop, but it's a good story.

Just having a SWAG (scientific wild arsed guess) at the colors in the photos from the link. 909 looks to have been painted in OD FS# 34087, the modern post war shade of OD. While both the Liberator and Mitchell are in a darker and greener shade of OD which I will really not guess at. None of which appear to be Olive Drab 41 which was what those planes would have been painted when they came out of the factory IF they had been painted OD during production. When OD 41 is new, it is darker and closer in hue to Green Drab FS# 34086 than OD FS# 34087. But OD 41 was prone to significant fading and weathering that could vary quite a bit depending upon the climate that the aircraft operated in. Add to that that Olive Drab has evolved and changed a bit over the past 100 years that the Army has been using it: Engineer color standard, Quartermaster color standard, ANA color standard, FS 595, FS 595A, and FS 595B color standard...

And herein lies the problem of using warbirds for reference of WWII aircraft. While they are good for some details, paint scheme is not one of them. They may or may not have been restored to original condition, and modern paints are not formulated the same as WWII era paints were. Not to mention that the owners nowadays take far better care of these now priceless machines than any crew did in WWII, when a flood of aircraft off of the assembly lines meant that appearance was the last thing needing to be thought of. Operational readiness for combat missions was the primary concern.

As has been noted above, the original 909 was scrapped and the Collings Foundation restored a NMF aircraft to represent the 909. So, the original is lost to time and we can only hope that the Collings Foundation did their due diligence in researching the 909, as I am sure they did, and the aircraft you see is an "accurate" representation" of the real 909; we hope.

Personally, I would build it however I wanted and put some faith in the Foundation's efforts to make the aircraft correct. So, I would attempt to match the paint to what I "see" in the photos. Unless I could find a clear image in color of the original or firm documentation clearly stating a starkly different shade of OD.

I have the walk around for the B-17G and it uses the 909 as an example in many of the photos and the color in the book is very similar to what we see on the web, perhaps a tad darker.

Basically, build it how YOU want, it's your plane. Just have fun doing it.

Since the Fortress has been one of my most favorite aircraft over the years, I've used almost every manufacturer's version of OD and NG.  As the others have noted earlier, OD was extremely susceptible to fading.  Some color photos show an almost purple color.

OD 41 was the standard for B-17F's and -G's.  Around 1943, the military re-booted their paint (ANA), and issued an OD that was not like OD 41.

Some sources claim that the "new" ANA 613 OD was never used on Fortresses, because by the time it was available, the Army Air Force was moving to unpainted (NMF) planes.

The upshot is that you can probably get by using almost any OD for your Fortress.

As for the Neutral Gray, it was a truly neutral color--some sources say simply black mixed with white in equal proportions.  The problem with many model paint offerings, is that they tend toward a bluish gray.

It's my humble and amateurish opinion that WEM's Colourcoats OD 41 and NG 43 come closest to the genuine paint.  They are both darker than you might think they should be, but the OD has a defninite greenish olive cast to it, rather than the brownish olive most model paints seem to run to.

That's my thoughts on it.  Others probably have different ideas, but I've seen entire threads devoted to OD, here and on other forums, and no one, ever, seems to be able to agree.

Good luck with it, Ken!

I think we would like to agree on Olive Drab,,,,,,,but, when you see paint companies do this, then you know why modelers can't agree, lol.

www.astromodel.it/.../olive-drab-colours.html , you get a larger picture if you click the bottom photo

then, you see that they also offer these separately, in addition to UA003, UA005, UA421, UA422, UA523, and 5 or 6 US uniform Olive Drabs,,,,,,and a few non-US Olives

after you see that one paint company has over 20 "Olive Drab" colors in their line,,,,,,,you get to understanding why we modelers can't agree on just what shade to use, many people will choose something from completely different paint lines than LifeColor,,,so, that is just one example,,,there might be close to 100 Olive Drab paints out there

Rex

ps, LifeColor paints are all slightly darker than the chips on their website,,at least the 84 of them that I have are