Brengun 1/48 Extra EA 300L Four Blade Propeller
By Jacob Russell
The Plane
The Extra EA 300 is a two-seat aerobatic monoplane designed in 1987 by Walter Extra and built by Extra Flugzeugbau in Hunxe, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It’s powered by a 300-horsepower fuel-injected horizontally-opposed 6-cylinder Lycoming AEIO-540 engine. It has a midset wing with a carbon fiber composite spar with carbon composite skins. The EA 300L is widely used in aerobatic training and competition. It has a cruise speed of 236 mph and a stall speed of 69 mph. There are 13 different Extra 300 variants.
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The Kit
Brengun’s kit comes in an end-opening box with evocative artwork of an in-flight EA 300L operated by the Chilean Air Force’s “Escadrille de Alta Acrobacia Halcones” (Falcons High Acrobatics Squadron). The airplane’s simplicity is reflected in the kit’s low parts count. It consists of 40 parts on 2 sprues plus a clear canopy. This is a limited-run kit and it is nicely detailed, although the panel lines are a bit deep. There’s some structural detail on the fuselage interior and it’s worth your while to spend some time applying an oil wash and some dry brushing of the raised elements as the cockpit canopy is quite large. Some of the parts are pretty small but they will be easy to remove from the sprues thanks to well-located attachment points. The kit will be an easy build and the instructions are well illustrated with a simple and logical assembly sequence.
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The decal sheet covers 3 different aircraft:
- Extra 300L, Rolf Nagel, Germany. This colorful plane is gloss yellow (no Federal Standard number or paint number given) with purple bands on the fuselage side and upper wings and horizontal stabilizers. The decals appear to conflict with the color profile, as the “purple” bands are actually dark pink outlined in purple. The spinner is yellow.
- Extra 300L, Volker Fuchs, Austria. This EA 300L has a white upper fuselage and a blue lower fuselage with a thin red band dividing the 2 colors. The wings and horizontal stabilizers have white leading edges and blue trailing edges, which are also divided by a thin red band. The spinner is white.
- Extra 300L, Chilean Air Force, Escuadrilla de Alta Acrobacia Halcones. Another striking and colorful EA 300, this plane has a blue upper fuselage and a white lower fuselage with a red spinner and fuselage band. The upper wings are blue and red, divided by a narrow white band. The lower wings are predominantly white with a thin blue leading edge. The trailing edges of the wings, including the flaps and ailerons, are red.
The decal sheet is well printed with strong colors, and all of the decals are in register.
Conclusion
This is a nice kit of a successful aircraft, with which I was previously unfamiliar. It’s a simple and well-engineered kit, and the 3 decal options are interesting. It offers an acceptable level of detail, and Brengun offers some aftermarket sets for it (reviewed separately) if you’re dissatisfied with the model’s level of detail out of the box. I recommend this kit, and I would like to thank Brengun for the review sample.
References
Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extra_Aircraft