Hawker Tempest TT.Mk.V

The Hawker Tempest is maybe the most famous of the late-war RAF fighter aircraft, and generally needs no introduction. Aces such as Pierre Clostermann flew the Tempest. What is less known is the aircraft's post-war career as a target tug. A total of 73 Tempest Mk.V aircraft were modified to the TT.Mk.V -standard, and served until the early 1950s. The aircraft my model depicts is the prototype Tempest target tug, converted in 1945, and the only one to have flown with a winch pod under the port wing. Note that the bomb under the starboard with was a dummy and served to balance the aircraft.

A surviving Tempest TT.Mk.V at RAF Museum in Hendon in 2010 (SMA photo).

Construction Notes

The Academy kit is generally accurate and well-detailed, and is really easy to build. I did add some photo-etch details from an old Eduard sheet (#SS129), both into the cockpit and into the main wheel wells. Seatbelts came from a newer, colored Eduard sheet. For the underwing landing lights, I glued a small piece of aluminum foil behind the lenses before closing the wing halves. I cut off the guns, and filled in the gun ports. Apart from the winch pod, the only thing I had to add to make this a target tug was the wire that protects the tail from the winch cable (there is a short pole just in front of the tail wheel to extend the wire far enough from the fuselage). I used EZ-Line for the wire, attached with CA glue.

Ready for interior green.

Ready to close the fuselage halves.

Winch Pod

The TT.Mk.V prototype was the only aircraft to carry the Malcolm G-type winch Mk.II in an underwing pod. I decided to scratch-build one, but first I needed scale plans. I constructed these based on photographs, only to realize later that [4] had a pod profile among the scale plans included. Lo and behold, that profile matched my plans. The pod itself was easy to construct from Evergreen tubing and some putty; I used the kit's bomb rack as the starting point for my pylon.

Malcolm winch pod fashioned from Evergreen stock and the kit's bomb rack.

Finished winch pod with decals applied.

All the small detail parts waiting for the airframe painting to be completed.

Painting and Markings

Painting this model was, quite frankly, a nightmare. I started by spraying the entire airframe with Alclad white primer, then masked off the areas that were to remain white (for the national markings, as the decals I prepared had no actual white in them). I then sprayed all the yellow, including around the rear fuselage for the tail band. The tricky part, next, was to get mask for the diagonal black stripes; getting the tape in the right angle and in the right places in general was difficult, but luckily I had photos I took many years ago at RAF Museum in Hendon. I used Mr.Color lacquers: semigloss black (#92) and a mixture of two yellows (#329 with some #109 added).

Finally, I masked the underside off, and sprayed Alclad's "Aluminum", thinking that after some semigloss clear coat it would look like "high speed silver" (that is, the post-war Tempest airframes were not showing natural metal, but were actually painted). All along the process some paint lifted when removing the masking tape, so there was a fair amount of remedial work. Also note that I cut a special mask for the tail band to account for the areas where the serial numbers were placed.

For the parts that are interior green I used Tamiya's XF-71 (IJN Cockpit Green) which in my mind comes close enough. I did not really weather the model much, except for very delicate exhaust stains using a highly diluted mixture of medium gray, sprayed at very low pressure.

I made my own decals, based on the photographs in [4] and what I had captured in Hendon. See my description of my Avro 707A for a description of the materials and the process. I was going to use the kit's decals for the wing walkways (instead of painting them, because masking at the wing root turned out to be too tricky); the first one of these decals disintegrated in water, so I scanned the remaining decal and used it as a pattern to make my own (it only took my 15 minutes, from the time I realized the original decals were no good, to have the new decals in place). After decals were in place and treated with some Mr.Mark Softer, the entire model was sprayed with Alclad's gloss clear coat, followed by a mixture of Testors' Glosscote and Dullcote.

First coat of primer sprayed.

Who thought masking a yellow aircraft with yellow masking tape was a good idea...?

Underside painting completed. Particular care had to be taken when masking the port wingtip, to fashion a yellow border for the roundel.

Underside markings in place.

Masked for the aluminum color. Note the white areas that have been masked: my decals had no white in them.

Topside painting completed.

The decals were easy to apply on the surface painted with Alclad, and only needed one coat of Alclad gloss clear coat.

First time on her own wheels. The Academy main landing gear struts are very weak, and had to be reinforced a bit with CA glue.

References Used

The Tempest is incredibly well documented; my own library has at least 40 books and magazine articles about the type. Below are some particularly useful reference sources: [3] contains a detailed cutaway drawing that proved useful for its details, [4] has several photographs of the aircraft my model depicts, and [1, 2, 5] are useful especially if one were to build Pierre Clostermann's famous Tempest.

1. Avions Juillet 2001
2. Avions Septembre 2004
3. Classic World War II Aircraft Cutaways (Gunston); Barnes & Noble Books 1999
4. Hawker Tempest Mks. II to VI (Caruana); Warpaint Series 55; Warpaint Books
5. Typhoon and Tempest Aces of World War 2 (Thomas); Osprey Aircraft of the Aces 27; Osprey 1999
6. Typhoon/Tempest in action (Scutts); Aircraft in Action 102; Squadron/Signal Publications 1990
7. My own photographs of Tempests, taken at the RAF Museum in Hendon in 2010 and at the Florida Air Museum in 2008

The main wheel well of a Tempest Mk.II (similar to that of Mk.V), photographed at the Florida Air Museum in 2008 (SMA photo).