Hasegawa F-22 Raptor Egg Plane
By Chris Banyai-Riepl
Overview
While many thought the Hasegawa Egg Planes were limited and not going to be added to, they have released a new-tool egg plane covering one of the newest planes in the world, the F-22 Raptor.
The Kit
Molded in light gray plastic, this plane is a great subject for conversion to egginess. The kit comes with two styles of pilot figures, detailed exhausts, and decals for several options. The surface detailing provides raised sections to denote some of the sawtooth edged panels. For the detail oriented, there are no open weapon bays, but come on, it's an Egg Plane!
The first option you come to on assembly is the pilot choice. One is a helmeted option, while the other has the visor up on the helmet. The option with the exposed face has a rather nice feature of decal eyes, with two sets provided to give an option of looking ahead or looking to the side. The helmeted example has an odd looking visor that is more reminiscent of Star Wars than USAF pilots.
With the pilot choice figured out, the main assembly is next. The fuselage/wing assembly is split into upper and lower halves, so building this up will be quite fast. The exhausts are separate and trapped between the two fuselage halves, and there are separate air intakes. After painting the cockpit, just drop in the pilot figure, add the two separate vertical fins and the clear canopy, and your F-22 is pretty much done. The only other step is to add the landing gear, which features separate main wheels and main gear doors.
For painting and markings, there are four options provided on the decal sheet. All four are finished in the standard F-22 camouflage consisting of two shades of gray. The first option has FF tailcodes and 1st FW written underneath, while the second is FF and 192 FW. Option three is from up north, with AK tail codes and 302 FS markings, while the fourth is marked with HO and 49 FW. The decals are nicely printed and include some of the various generic detail markings as well, which will help break up the monotonous gray body.
Conclusion
This is a great addition to the Hasegawa Egg Plane series, and will look great next to some of their earlier releases. My thanks to Hasegawa USA for the review sample.