by Jan Mikes

Relatively unknown Su-15 got its fifteen minutes of fame in August, 1983 when Flagon marked „red 17“ piloted by Lt. Col. Gennadi Osipovich shot down Korean Airlines Boeing 747 on flight KAL 007. For some reason, the 747 was far off its course, over the Soviet territory. Among many explanations is simple stray as well as CIA-inspired mission to alert Soviet air defence system and enable U.S. military to analyze subsequent electronic buzz. 

Anyway, what lead Soviets to  give order to shot down the airplane remains clouded in mystery. Pilot of Su-15 could not communicate with the KAL007 to order it to land on the Soviet airport.  Pilot Osipovich did not even try to contact KAL007 on the radio ("How can I talk with him? You must know the language.", he says).   Furthermore, shells of Osipovich’s cannons did not contain tracers so they were not visible at night. Pilots of 747 made attempts to communicate with Osipovich by switching the position lights on but got no reaction from the Su-15.

When it became clear that 747 would leave Soviet airspace in matter of minutes, commanders gave Osipovich order to shot the 747 down. One missile hit the plane, but did not destroy the 747 instantly. Airliner was still flying but it started to lose altitude. After about fifteen minutes of horror for those aboard, 747 finally crashed to the sea. All 269 passengers and crew members died.

Pilot Osipovich, now retired, is very unapologetic for his role. In interviews he gave in 1990s he openly admits he was aware that plane he pursues was civilian Boeing 747. Pilot insists that shooting down civilian plane with 269 passengers aboard "means nothing" to him as he "defended the country" because the plane must have been on spy mission.

Click on images below to see larger images

Construction 

When I opened the box, my first impressions were all positive. The sprues look very good. Fine recessed panel lines, great fit.

First dry fitting revealed the problem with the nose cone. It is attached in the wrong angle to the fuselage. I corrected it and thought everything will go smooth. But most surprising findings were still ahead. 

Only when I finished rough assembly of the model (fuselage, wings, rudder, nose cone), I started to realize that something is seriously wrong with my Flagon.

After comparing the model to pictures of Su-15TM I downloaded from the web, it seemed that there was some problem with relative dimensions of  individual parts of the aircraft. To find out what the problem is, I got the plans and  compared the semi-finished model to them. 

These are the result of comparing the model to the plans :

1) The nose part of the plane in front of the canopy is 1.2 cm (0.47 inches) longer than it should be(!!!). The shape is wrong too).

2) The wingspan is right to the scale, but the inner angle of the wing is much too steep.

3) Error 2 results into part of the fuselage where wing is attached being 0.5 cm (0.20 inches) longer   

4)  The fuselage behind the wing is 0.3 cm (0.12 inches) longer than it should be

5) Horizontal tail surfaces should have wrong shape.

6) The front landing gear should be 0.5 cm (0.20 inches) higher

7)  The very end of the fuselage is too narrow

8) The shape of the canopy is not 100% right and also the rear mirror on top of the canopy is missing

9) There is number of other small errors like missing antennas on the bottom side of the fuselage ("three fingers" so common on soviet 1960s and 1970s fighters), all small air intakes on the rest of the fuselage are too high, "thorns" on the horizontal tail surfaces are 0.4 cm (0,16 inches) too short…. 

Combination of these small, not so small and fatal errors causes that Trumpeter’s Su-15TM build out of the box would look rather like entry into "what if" contest. OK, I do not need a super accurate model but I wanted the finished model to ‘look like a Flagon‘. This means: I decided to forget efforts on fixing problems No’s 2,3,4 and 7 while doing my best to correct others.

The most challenging part of my correction efforts was remodelling of the nose. Wrong shape and dimensions of this part of Trumpeter’s Su-15TM is the single most devastating error of Trumpeter’s kit. Look at the pictures to see how I have done the correction.

Click on images below to see larger images

I will not go into details about other corrections I did because they were not as 'dramatic' as the nose correction. Just check the plans and you will see what needs to be done.

I think that even for a weekend modeller like me it should not be unthinkable to correct errors with wrong wing angle and excess milimetres of the fuselage. It is just matter how much time are you ready to spend on it. I would certainly go for it if I had known about the problem before I glued things together.  

Painting & Decals

Of course, I wanted to paint my Su15TM as infamous “red 17”. First I should say that there is no photo of the “red 17” available, so all my following remarks refers to 'standard' Su-15TMs scheme.

When checking the references, note that most of the pictures available on the net are pictures of the machines in Russian museums. It seems that Russians have fashion of repainting these machines regularly.  So the only option for a modeller is to use pictures of the OPERATIONAL aircraft as reference! 

The “red 17” was in all metal finish, with nose cone, top of the rudder, one round panel behind the cockpit and one on the belly in “Russian radome green”. Another prominent feature is black anti-glare band in front of the cockpit. (It has completely different –rounded- shape from what Trumpeter’s painting guide proposes). 

This project was my first attempt on the bare metal finish. I used five shades of Humbrol and Revell metallizers. I used “reverse masking” technique: after spraying couple of coats of one shade of mettalizer, I masked the panels I wanted to keep in this shade and continued with another shade.

It took me about 10 evenings of masking and airbrushing to finish it. 

As for the kit's decals, they look very good, but are close to unusable.  Just to name most prominent decals on the sheet: red stars are too big, bort number “17” has wrong shape, the decals with  black-yellow stripes on the jet intake are inaccurate. For stars and red 17 I used decals from my spare decals box, jet intake decals were modified from Trumpeter’s sheet.

As far as stenciling is concerned, I found it very difficult to identify some standard on Su-15TMs- stenciling seems to differ from one production series to another. So I chose some close-up photos of several operational machines and used them as a guide. Needless to say Trumpeter’s guide for stenciling is useless. I used couple of decals from Trumpeter’s sheet after modifying them. Others were from my spares box.

Weathering was done with watercolors and I accentuated panel lines with pencil. I did not use any clear coat because I did not know what it would do with metallizers below it. 

Conclusions 

Well, Trumpeter’s Su-15TM is very, very inaccurate, OOB it would not even look like SU-15TM. Painting guide is misleading and decals are unusable.

On the other hand, the kit was a challenge and I learned lot by building my 1/48 Flagon. I can live with the errors I was too lazy to correct. Now it looks like a Flagon and that is all that matters to me.

The only thing I am really angry about is the price. Incorrect model? OK.  Very incorrect model? If it is the only one on the market and I really want to build this plane, I can live with it. But $40 for it??? This is just not fair!!! 

Comments welcome,

Jan 

Prague, Czechia

Click on images below to see larger images

P.S.

Trumpeter’s Su-15 kit got very good reviews (in Fine Scale Modeller and elsewhere). How come nobody noticed the substantial shortcomings of the kit as far as accuracy is concerned? How come nobody bothered to compare finished model to the pictures of real airplane, let alone plans?

References: 

Interview with pilot of “red 17” Pavel Osipovich by New York Times:  http://users.rcn.com/lana.interport/link/colonel.html

Transcript of taped conversation between Osipovich and his Flight controller during 747 pusruit: http://www.rescue007.org/shootdown.htm 

"Flight 007" by Jason Manning -an insightful article about shotdown and its political consequences:  http://eightiesclub.tripod.com/id267.htm

Plans of SU-15TM: http://www.airwar.ru/other/draw/su15.html