I've been building the early jets and it became the F-80's turn. It would have been nice to do the XP-80 but it really had little in common with the Monogram kit, being a lot smaller and planned for a different engine. I some time in the past bought a bunch of P/F 80 sets from Fox 3, Gerry Asher, and for this I used the resin and vacuform parts to do a P-80 from the first production block, the P-80A-1. These airplanes were painted ADC Grey and were filled and polished. The finishes didn't last well at all and the P-80A-5 and later airplanes were all delivered in bare aluminum. The P-80A-1 had a landing light in the nose in place of the black panel that covered a radio direction finder antenna in later airplanes, and the cockpit was 9 inches further aft than later P-80's with ejection seats. Early P-80's were not built with ejection seats although many were later retrofitted with them.
Four P-80's from the -1 Block were sent to Europe before the end of WW II, and two of them were sent to Italy where they flew but did not enter into any combat. The other two went to England where one was lost in a crash.
A P-80A-1 with the markings "Lil' Abner", an Al Capp character from the cartoon Dogpatch, was flown by Rex Barber, who was a participant in the Yamamoto shootdown and is most likely the pilot who fired the fatal shots. He was commander of a P-80 squadron at March Field.
It seems strange to see a jet with an antenna wire and masts, but that's the way it was with the first P-80's.
I worked really hard to keep the detail on the bottom while fixing the parting line between the front and rear fuselage so I wouldn't lose all the liitle bumps. After the model was nearly done and I was adding the antenna masts to the bottom I happened to read the part of the instructions where it said to remove the bumps because they were for JATO bottle mounting, an item which the A-1 was not equipped. You can get it right when you build yours!
And with some other early jets, the Gloster Meteor F.3 and the Bell XP-59A.
