1/144 Be-12

My Believ Be-12 Flying Boat is finally done. It is a graceful bird in the air and in the water, though like most waterfowl it looks a little goofy on land.

The world is wrong: this machine has attractive lines.

The feet are definitely awkward and webbed.

 First, about the kit: it is a 1/144 scale kit from Amodel, a eastern European or possibly Russian kit manufacturer. They have a large line of interesting subjects in 1/144, mostly Russian subjects obscure in the west (like this Be-12), though they don't limit themselves to the sphere of the former Warsaw pact. They make a 1/144 scale DHC-5 Buffalo and a Grumman Albatross that I may pick up someday. They've been getting some western distributors recently, though I found them on hobbyterra.com/, a very good online shop in Russia that specializes in eastern model manufacturers.

My Be-12 kit came with photoetch parts, though also with the warning that Amodel used technology different from most manufacturers, and that they were for people with some experience under their belt. As it turns out, they were not kidding. My Be-12 was a new mould, but had a fair bit of flash, and nearly all the parts required judicious cleanup. Unlike some old Revell America kit, where it came from worn out moulds and was probably poorly engineered to begin with, Amodel's kit went together well - it's just that it requires more work to get there than what a modern modeller may be used to. The instructions were also pretty good.

No, if I'm a little disappointed in the kit, it's because it sort of got away from me. I made it over an unusually long time frame when a lot of other stuff was going on in my life, making it hard to focus on building. Further, I made two mistakes. First, I got the color shade rather wrong - you can find blue Be-12s (in fact, here is a picture of the very airplane I was aiming for) but I didn't fade the blue enough. To make matters worse, by the time I realized this, I had the decals on. (If you look at that photo, you can see that Be-12s have a water line. Amodel included this in the kit - but it inevitably tore when I tried to apply it.) To try and fade the paint, I tried some very thinned white - which sort of worked, but also caused some white splatters that sort of look like gull shit. Authentic! But not really what I wanted.

Amodel as mentioned included some photoetch parts, which look fine, but I had trouble 1) applying and 2) actually keeping on the kit. The detail for a 1/144 kit was actually kind of mind-blowing: they include such details as the tiny eye-hole on the nose, and a small porcupine's worth of tiny antennas, most of which did not survive my giant fingers. So, trouble concentrating AND bordering on beyond my skill - in retrospect, it's not surprising I didn't quite get there.

Still, the Gull in Teal cuts an impressive figure. Some people think it an ugly airplane - but I think it has a certain functional charm (like a duck or a goose, or maybe a Tern in flight) that I quite enjoy.

I'm excited to get onto my next project - a 1/144 scale B-36. Or a RB-36 to be specific, the reconnaissance-bomber version--

A short spiel on the Beriev Be-12 Chaika -

The Be-12 acttracted me for several reasons. First, it's an aircraft that never came to the west, and was rarely seen by the Western military during the cold war. Second, it's an amphibian (IE a flying boat with landing gear). Third, it's one of the last flying boats designed and deployed, so it lacks the turret barnacles of WW2 era flying boats, and has modern turboprop instead of reciprocating engines. And lastly, doing a little background reading, I discovered the Be-12's career is a triumph of sensible engineering - a utility infielder employed in a variety of roles, its one of the few ex-Soviet airplanes who's airframes were consumed through use rather than being shunted off to fields at the collapse of the USSR.

It was deployed at the start of the 1960s, to replace the Be-6, a similar flying boat dating back to World War 2. It's primary mission  was hunting American submarines, who in their first generation of cruise missiles, would have to launch close to the coast of Russia. It was equipped with sonar buoys, torpedoes that could hoam in acoustically, and even  tactical-nuclear depth charges. It was equipped with radar in the front and rear, and a MAD (Magnetic Anomaly Detector) boom in the rear.  The 'amphibious' aspect of the Be-12 was much appreciated by ground crews: the Be-6 had no landing gear, and while wading around in the Black Sea attaching wheels for getting a Be-6 into a beach-side hanger was no big deal, it was quite another matter in Murmansk and Vladivostok. It soon acquired a nickname: "Chaika' (Gull). NATO gave it the callsign 'Mail'.

The West considered it a throwback even in 1960, having decided that flying boats were a thing of the past. By 1970, America's advances in missile technology made the Be-12's original mission doubtful. It then became a maid-of-all-work for Soviet Naval Aviation, doing coastal maritime patrol, search and rescue, and acting as a transport. Easy to maintain and excellent to fly, the "chikia" was popular with pilots and ground crews alike. A total of 150 were made at Believ's factory at Tagarog, near the increasingly misnamed Sea of Azov. Nearly all Gulls made were still being used at the fall of the Soviet Union, and apparently were used until the airframes wore out. A few old Gulls are still in service, seemingly on the Black Sea and Crimea. After the fall of the USSR, some surplus Be-12s were converted to water bombers - like the CL-215, they can skim the surface of a lake to collect water, then return to the sky. They were only exported once, with Vietnam receiving four in the early 80s - though the Ukraine inherited a few in the divorce as well.

From the wonderful Wings of Russia series on youtube, here is some footage of a Be-12 in action. It's worth watching, if only to watch a airplane roll into the water off of a boat launch, and *then* retract its landing gear.

As you can see, the Be-12 is not exactly small.

A note for anybody thinking of building this model: the tail boom on the real thing does have an 'end cap', presumably for maintenance. I erased the lines on mine.

I added oil stains and exhaust on the tail last - in retrospect, oil effects might have been able to give me a more realistic look.