Cessna O-2A Skymaster

Construction
The plastic in the box comes on two big sprues of grey-coloured plastic that has some amazing looking detail. It’s nice and sharp, with well-defined panels and excellent raised detail as well, especially on the instrument panel. There is minimal flash, although a few of the injection gates are in awkward places and the plastic is a little rough looking, although I actually like that surface finish as it’ll take to the paint nicely. The downside is that the plastic is very soft. This makes it easy to work with and the glue makes good, string bonds, but it’s also easy to damage and has no structural strength at all, which will cause some serious problems for the undercarriage later I can tell you.
It all starts with the interior and that’s where a lot of the detail goes, with the instrument panel and the radio/communications gear in the back being particularly nice. The decals for the main instrument panel are excellent and settle down over the raised detail without any trouble at all. The seats are a little plain as there are no belts and the positioning needs to be altered from the instructions as the observer/co-pilot should be set back from the pilots seat. But you do get a couple of M-16 assault rifles to put in the back! The interior is two tones of green for this era aircraft, with Olive Drab upper section and Black Green lower, with a black floor. One point to mention is that the windows are fixed in place now and please make sure they are well glued in, as I managed to push a couple of them in much later in the build and that was a real pain!
You also get a simple but effective representation of the Teledyne Continental, flat-six engine for the front compartment, complete with intake manifold and exhaust pipes. All of which is jammed into the front section, over the nose wheel bay, which has to have the oleo assembled before construction. As this bit is very weak I suggest drilling out the centre and fitting a metal tube I there, as I did later in fact. Trust me, this plastic has no strength to it at all. This leaves just enough space at the front for some weight to be added. You’ll need at least 10g and I added 14g and it will still sit on it’s tail if you put it there, so the more weight you get in there the better. The fuselage halves close up quite well, although it’s a little tricky getting the various bulkheads and the floor aligned. I ended up using a bit of filler along most of the joints on this kit, especially around the complicated shapes of the rear engine bay. Construction of the remaining airframe parts is really easy though as the fit of the parts is very good, following the instructions pretty much to the letter showed up no major pitfalls. The parts have positive locations and the fit and finish is excellent, so while I had to use filler on the fuselage, there’s none necessary on the wings and tail. 
All in all, the construction part of it is fairly trouble free but it’s not all roses and the most serious fault is the strength of the part no: B5, the undercarriage beam. On the real aircraft there is no oleo leg for the main undercarriage, it’s just a large sprung steel aerofoil section. While the kit part is the right size and shape, because the plastic is so soft it has no hope at all of successfully holding the model in the correct position for long. It took just a single night (admittedly it was hot) for the whole thing to sag alarmingly and become decidedly lop-sided. I fixed it by using a couple of pieces of very thin stainless steel, cut to shape and glued onto the underside of the beam. I would recommend getting a white metal version or doing the support work before fitting the item and it’s cover, B18.

Colour & Markings
This little aircraft has one particular look to it that always comes to mind when thinking of the Vietnam era machines, with white and grey camouflage and some crazy lettering imploring people not to shoot at it. So why is it that AK (who were in charge of the markings design) gave ICM two of the most completely drab and boring machines you could possibly get? There are four options to chose from, one all over black, which is a good variation, one in the grey/white with some little Australian bits on it and the national markings on the wrong wing, which is also good. Then you get two that are identical to the Aussie one apart from numbers and badges and some colour flashes. There are umpteen seriously fun versions that could have been on offer, including the famous “DON’T SHOOT”, as well as dozens with nose art and other wing inscriptions. That’s a serious missed opportunity by ICM as far as I’m concerned.
Anyway, I ignored all that and chose one of the more fun versions, this one with FAC in large black letters on the upper and lower wing and over-sized stars and bars to go with it. The Grey and White both come from Gunze-Sangyo Aqueous Hobby Color, although the actual shade of Light Aircraft Grey FS16473 isn’t in the range, there’s plenty that are close enough. The black lettering was masked and sprayed, as were the wing and tail tips, making a very striking looking machine, this time with minimal weathering. So I retrained my normally dirty habits to just a few dabs of pastel dust and a little Tamiya X-19 smoke along the panels and especially around the engine compartments. 
This was sealed in under some gloss and it’s time for the decals. The big stars and bars for the wings came from the spares box (Caracal Decals) and the rest were the ICM ones. These decals are hard to use because they are extremely thin and tend to wrap around themselves the moment you get them off the backing paper. This means that the decalling process took far longer than usual for just a few markings, but the end results are worth the pain because they are literally faultless once dry. They really do look like they’re sprayed on, so well done to ICM for that. Final markings are the tail number, once again scrounged out of the decal box and the little ace of spades badge on each fin which was hand painted. Not ideal in this scale but with no other option, it’ll do.
             
Final Details
This little Cessna thankfully doesn’t have too much to do right at the end. There are a plethora of aerials and things mind you, as well as the wheels and most importantly, the weapons. In the box you get four LAU-68 rocket launchers and two SUU-11B gun pods to choose from. It’s a pity you don’t get the phosphorous smoke marker rocket attachments but I’m not complaining at all about the choices. There are also a few light fittings to sort out with the most noticeable being the one on the tip of the starboard fin and the landing lights in the wing leading edges. Finally there’s the long whip aerial (stretched sprue in this case) and the radio antenna wire from tail fin to wing on the port side. After that it’s a final finish of Xtracolor matt varnish and once the masking is off and cleared up, that’s a complete Skymaster.

Conclusion
I’ve been waiting for a new-tooled one of these for years! The ancient Testors one is seriously hard work so this ICM version is very welcome indeed. I loved the detail and the general fit and finish but hated the soft plastic and disappointing decal choices. I can see ICM doing an O-2B (because the spinners are in the box) and there are any number of civilian versions they could do and I’d buy at least one of each! Can’t say fairer than that.

Our thanks to ICM for the review sample.

Paints used
Alclad II
ALC-600 Aqua Gloss
ALC103 dark Aluminium
ALC-113 Jet Exhaust
ALC-121 Burnt Iron

Gunze Mr Hobby Aqueous Hobby Color acrylic:
H307 Dark Ghost Grey
H308 Light Ghost Grey
H316 Insignia White
H317 Dark Gull Grey

Vallejo acrylic:
62.020 Black
71.062 Aluminium

Xtracolor enamel:
XDFF Matt Varnish