Bilek's 1/72
MiG-21 PFM "Fishbed F"

By Chris Banyai-Riepl

History

The MiG-21 is probably the best-known Soviet jet fighter and its performance has kept it in service in air forces around the world even today, decades after the first prototype took to the air. With rapidly changing technological advancements in military equipment, the MiG-21 design changed over the years, with the result that the last MiG-21 resembles the first in general outline only. The MiG-21PFM was an improvement over the PF version. The fin was broader and a brake chute fairing was added. Other aspects of the PF remained the same, such as the lack of fuselage guns. This led to the design of an external gun pod housing a 23mm cannon.

A subvariant of the PFM was the PFM(SPS), which incorporated Fowler-type flaps that used bypass air from the engine to prevent airflow separation from the landing flap surface. In Russian this was referred to as "sduv pogranichnogo sloya", or SPS. In addition to the change in flaps, ejection seats were changed in the PFM(SPS) to the more familiar KM-1 zero-zero ejection seat. This greatly increased pilot survivability at low-altitude, low-speed ejections.

The Kit (click on thumbnails for larger image)

Given the huge abundance of MiG-21s in the world, it is surprising that there aren't more kits of them out there. Fujimi did an excellent series of MiG-21s, but they had a few flaws and tended to be quite pricey. Luckily, Bilek has started putting out some early MiG-21 kits, and the latest one, the MiG-21PFM, is a great kit.

When this kit came across my desk, the first thing I looked at was the big problem area on the Fujimi kits: the main wheel bulges. For some reason, the Fujimi kit has the main wheel bulges staggered, with the upper bulge being further aft than the lower. This is a difficult problem to fix and most people I know have just left it as is. Well, the Bilek kit does not suffer from that, and the bulges are correctly aligned. With that potential headache out of the way, I started looking at the rest of the kit. The parts have finely done recessed panel lines, although they might be too fine. After sanding it down, they might disappear altogether. The breakdown of the kit suggests future kits, with all the major common parts such as the wings and tailplanes being on separate sprues. In fact, after looking at that sprue, I noticed the gun bulges for the MiG-21F-13 on it, so they are definitely planning on getting as many miles out of this mold as possible.

The cockpit interior is pretty good for an injection cockpit, but there is room for improvement. The instrument panel has all the right shape to it, but the instruments are just slight circular indentations. A brass or resin detail set would go a long ways here. Two seats are provided, both the SK-1 and KM-1, allowing you to make either a PFM or a PFM(SPS). The rest of the fuselage is made up of inserts for the wheel wells that are nicely detailed, a fairly long exhaust nozzle, and a two-piece nose cone. No mention of weight is in the instructions, but with this plane it is likely that there will need to be something up front to keep it from sitting on its tail.

The rest of the assembly is very straightforward. The wings and stabilizers are one piece affairs, with some basic locating pegs. The instructions point out that the wings should have a three-degree anhedral, while the tailplanes should be horizontal. The vertical tail is one piece as well, and no locating tab is provided for it. Other vanes, vents, wing fences, and such are provided separately, and the instructions give dimensions in millimeters as to their precise location. Some careful marking and gluing will be needed with these to make sure they are aligned correctly from all angles.

The decal sheet is not very big, but it still manages to cram no less than six different options on it. There are two Czech choices, two Soviet, one German, and one Vietnamese. Starting with the Soviet examples, the first option is as the box art depicts, with red upper surfaces and natural metal undersides. The second Soviet option, red 33, is simply natural metal overall. The first Czech option is natural metal overall, with a castle badge on the nose. The second one is by far the most colorful of all the choices, being natural metal overall, with a fuselage stripe in red outlined with blue, with white stars and the fuselage spine painted blue, with the tail split in blue, red, and white. A very impressive looking MiG-21, that's for sure! The Vietnamese option is light gray overall with green splotches, while the German choice is finished in dark green and dark brown over a light blue. The decals are printed by MPD and feel very thin. They are in excellent register except for the German flags, which for some reason seems to always out of register, regardless of the decal manufacturer.

Conclusion

Overall this is an excellent kit of the MiG-21 and it fits the drawings in the 4+ book on the MiG-21 perfectly. I hope that Bilek keeps putting out different variants. I, for one, would like to see some two-seat MiG-21s done at this level of quality.