Italeri 1/72nd A-7E Corsair II
   
Moulded in Italeri's usual light gray plastic this is, I'm told, a re-release of the Esci kit and is a fairly decent rendition of the "Short Little Ugly Fella" or "Short Little Ugly F***er", depending on who you talk to. Italeri aren't telling how many pieces are in the box and I have better things to do with my time than counting bits of plastic so suffice to say, you get a nice full box of styrene for your six quid. The box is one of those awful "part losing" end opening types that Italeri insists on using depite the fact that everyone loathes them - myself included. There is a fairly dramatic, if somewhat simplistic, artists rendition on the front and pictures of a built up model on the box sides, which I think is a first for Italeri.

Click on thumbnails for the bigger picture....

The real aircraft was 46' 1 1/2" (14.06m) long with a wingspan of 38' 9" (11.80m) according to my references and the kit does fairly well in comparison. The span is spot on but the length is a scale 7 1/2" short, the deficiency being between the leading edge of the wing and the rear of the cockpit. That amounts to about 3/32 of an inch in the real world so I'll leave it up to you if you want to correct it. Personally I don't think I'll bother. Test fitting the major components reveals no fit problems and it looks like an A-7 - that's good enough for me.
Cockpit is completely devoid of detail with decals for the instrument and side panels and a very simplistic seat. The landing gear is however quite decent with some nicely moulded detail and it captures the robust look of the original very well.
Underwing stores consist of two drop tanks, two Sidewinders, two Sparrows, ten bombs and a couple of other missiles. I'll readily admit I don't know much about modern weapons so I'm not sure what the other missiles are. They look nice though....
Four decal options are included. The spiffy looking VA-93 example on the box art plus VA-87, VA-147 and a lo-viz aircraft from VA-86. The decals are well printed and in register and look quite thin on the sheet. I've always found Italeri decals to be excellent with good colour density and adhesion and I have no reason to think these will be any different.

Other than the box, I have two major complaints with this kit, or more precisely, with Italeri:
1) They insist on moulding jet intakes as flat blanks with no depth. They did it with their F-100 and they've done it with this and it looks like crap. You can kind of get away with it on an aircraft that has fairly small intakes like the F-5 or the F9F Panther, but let's face it, the main focal point of the A-7 is that huge gaping intake on the front! Yes I know that this is how Esci moulded it originally and that tooling an intake trunking and engine fan would add to the cost but frankly I wouldn't mind paying a bit extra for them. Granted, Italeri do include an intake cover with this kit but I still think it's a cop-out.

2) All the sprues are rattling around loose in the box. I have yet to open an Italeri kit that doesn't have parts off the sprues (add that to the end opening box and you have a sure fire way of losing bits) and scratched clear parts. This one went one better and the canopy has a large crack in it to go with its scrapes and scratches. Six weeks and several emails later and I have yet to receive a replacement, being told that the kit was out of stock but due in any day now and I would have new parts as soon as possible. Sometime before my retirement would be nice....**

All in all, a pretty nice model in a pretty awful box. Price is very reasonable and with a bit of extra detailing a very nice Corsair ll can be built from this kit but please Italeri, start packaging these things better and give us some decent intakes like you did with the Boeing X-32.
References:
Modelaid Quarterly International
Special Model Engineer Issue 1984
Combat Aircraft of the World
John W.R. Taylor 1969
Aircraft Archive Post-War Jets Vol. 2
Argus Books 1988
** 12/11/02 - Well, only 4 1/2 months and many emails later I finally got my replacement canopy!