Special Hobby's 1:72 FMA IA.58A Pucara By Chris Bucholtz

Introduction

Built to a specification similar to that which yielded the OV-10 Bronco a few years earlier, the IA.58A Pucara was built with the mission of counter-insurgency (COIN) in mind. It was designed to function from unprepared airstrips, provide great visibility to the crew and be very agile if not fast. The result was a surprisingly large (47 feet 6 3/4 inches in span and 49 feet 9 1/4 inches in length) aircraft powered by two Turbomeca Astazou XVIG turboprops that gave it a top speed of 310 mph.

The Pucara was the latest in a series of native-designed and built aircraft for the Argentinean military, taking to the air for the first time in 1969. In 1975, four Pucaras helped stem the flow of communist guerrillas into Argentina from Bolivia, and in 1978 they were deployed to Patagonia to serve as a show of force against Chile during a period of tensions.

Despite these effective episodes (and similar incidents in Sri Lanka, where the government has used the aircraft against the Tamil Tiger rebels), the Pucara is best known for its role in the 1982 Falklands Islands War. When the Falklands were taken, the runways at Port Stanley were damaged and only aircraft like the Pucara could operate from them. Other Pucaras were stationed on Pebble Island, north of West Falkland Island.

On May 15, the Pucaras suffered their first losses, not in aerial combat but at the hands of the SAS, which raided the airstrip at Pebble Island and destroyed 11 aircraft without losing a man. On May 21, four Pucaras attacked men of 2 Para on the slopes of Sussex Mountain, only to have one aircraft destroyed by a missile fired from either a Harrier or a ship in San Carlos Water and a second dispatched by a Stinger fired by members of a nearby SAS unit. The other two aircraft escaped unharmed without inflicting any casualties. On May 24, two Pucara set out to attack a section of British artillery that was supporting efforts to capture Goose Green, but a Blowpipe missile team dissuaded them. Later, after an action that claimed the life of 2 Para commander Col. H. Jones, a Scout casevac helicopter stumbled into Pucara strike. The Pucaras destroyed the Scout, which crashed in flames. Soon, two more Pucaras attacked; one dropped napalm that exploded wide of D Company, which shot down one with small arms fire. A Royal Marine with a Blowpipe brought down the second aircraft.

This summarized the combat career of the Pucara in the Falklands. It was utterly unsuited for taking on a modern fighting force equipped with sophisticated air defense weapons, and outclassed in the face of opposition by Royal Navy and RAF Harriers. Most residents of the northern hemisphere who have seen the Pucara in person have seen it in a British military museum (five were brought back as trophies). Still, for the COIN mission, the Pucara represents a very successful indigenous design, and the aircraft is still in service in Argentina 35 years after its first flight.

The Kit

There have been vacuformed and resin kits of the Pucara in the past, but Special Hobby's IA.58A is a first in injection molded plastic. The kit has 73 injection-molded parts, 12 resin parts, 63 photoetched parts and a very clear canopy injection-molded in the closed position.

The cockpit features two somewhat simple resin ejection seats that are each outfitted with two ejection handles and four photoetched seat belts. The control panels and side consoles are formed with a mixture of photoetched panels and levers attached to plastic shapes, and well-done rudder pedals and control columns finish out the cockpit. Separate coamings for the control panels are included in plastic, but these are very thick and might better be replaced with sheet styrene.

The fuselage of the surprisingly-large Pucara is split into three parts, a left and right half with a lower belly plug that includes the lower wing roots. The scribing is restrained throughout, and the surface is slightly rough, meaning that a little sanding might help with painting later on. The placement of the cannon bulges is troublesome; they will impede the sanding of the seam just at the wing root. The wings have the nacelles molded into them, and the main wheel bays have a roof and an outer bulkhead to prevent a see-through wing. The fronts of the nacelles are provided as halves, and the distinctive protruding engines are given as resin parts.

The landing gear struts are decent enough, but the wheels (all five of them) are provided as halves with no locating aids. If you can cast resin, I'd suggest getting one wheel to look right and then making five copies to simplify your clean-up efforts. Anti-torque scissors are provided as photo-etched parts, as are the details for the retraction struts on the main gear.

The wings and horizontal stabilizers butt-join to the fuselage, although the wings have an extra step created by the lower wing-belly insert that should provide a little extra support. The underwing pylons come in halves, and there is no ordnance provided in the kit. The propellers are six-part assemblies, constituting three soft-looking plastic blades, a hub, a backing plate and a spinner. Photoetched parts finish the build by providing static discharge wicks and antenna. Oh, and one more part: the canopy. This is an absolutely clear molding that would be at home in a box from Tamiya or Hasegawa. The only way it could be better would be for a second canopy and windshield in the open position to accompany it.

I should also mention the instructions. These are the typical, largely wordless instructions often seen in these types of kits, but there are notes included about the colors of the struts, propellers and cockpit. One note indicates a change of color following the Falklands War, a thoughtful inclusion on Special Hobby's part.

The decals include four Falklands Pucaras: A-511, which wears a light brown/light green banded camouflage pattern and light blue undersides, which was shot down May 21 by a Harrier (or by a shipboard missile, depending on sources); A-549, finished in a similar scheme but with an aluminum rudder and patch on the spine, which was captured and now resides at the Imperial War Museum at Duxford; A-520, an overall aluminum aircraft destroyed in the SAS raid on Pebble Island; and A-568, a second aluminum-finished machine that flew from mainland Argentina during the war and survived the conflict. All aircraft wear roundels on the fuselage and the upper left and lower right wings and sport an Argentinean flag on the vertical fin. The decals are reasonably in register and the colors appear accurate.

The down sides of this kit are the wheels molded in halves, the absence of ordnance and the very noticeable omission of the centerline weapons pylon. Other than these fairly easily overcome issues, Special Hobby's Pucara is a very nicely engineered and detailed model that could present intermediate modelers with a fun challenge and fill in a hole in the admittedly small line-up of aircraft that fought over the Falklands.