Eduard 1/48 Mirage IIIC

Born out of a lightweight fighter spec from the late 1950s, the Mirage III was arguably France’s most successful fighter plane ever and one of its most famous exports (next to wine, cheese and Catherine Deneuve.)  The Mirage III was part of the trend of 50s era delta jets, but it proved to be most versatile and longest lasting of them all. 

The Six Day War proved to be it’s first and most important combat as Israeli pilots flying Mirage IIICJs (J for Jewish) helped destroy several Arab air forces in a matter of hours on June 5, 1967.   This success helped the French sell many Mirages world wide, but also helped end the relationship between France and Israel in 1968.  Despite being cut off, the Israelis would fly the Mirage IIICJ and its variants thru the 1970 War of Attrition and the 1973 Yom Kippur War till the French built Mirages were replaced by Israeli made Daggers, Neshers and Kfirs which were based on the Mirage. 

The design of the Mirage III proved to be so successful that it evolved into a ground attack version which became the Mirage V (which was based on Israeli specifications and never sold to them due to DeGaulle’s arms embargo in the late 60s) and upscaled into the Mirage IV, France’s only supersonic strategic bomber.  It’s descendant Mirage 2000 is still in service today with various air forces including France’s. 

Eduard produced its Mirage kit in 2002 to wide acclaim, but it seems not a popular kit to built.

This particular boxing is the first ever Eduard Royal Class kit.  A Royal Class boxing contains everything (short of paint and glue) that is required to build a highly detailed kit short of opening up all the compartments.

 The kit comes with all the photo etch required to build it plus two resin pieces, the ejection seat and the cockpit rear bulkhead.  Plus it includes a multitude of schemes which encompass all the Eduard releases of the Mirage IIIC.  Among the schemes are various French, South African and Israeli planes.  Some are baremetal while many are camouflaged (the color callouts in Gunze paint.)

 The plastic is okay, but I can see some of the parts need serious cleaning to do as there seems to be a misalignment.

My copy’s canopy seems to be distorted as mentioned in Tom Cleaver’s build article, but it has more to with the shape than the manufacturing process.

Finally, it comes with the Lock On, PC air combat simulator game.

This kit is still the ultimate Mirage IIIC kit and comes with everything required to make an award winner if you so choose. 

I will say that I’ve spoken to a few modelers about Eduard Royal Class Kits and they seem to have a reluctance to build them because of the price and the pressure of building the “perfect” model can be quite intimidating which is understandable.

Kit courtesy of my wallet.  I’m usually happy to buy the profi-pack version of the kit instead of the Royal Class kits, but I bought this one at a considerable discount a few years ago when the LHS wanted to get clear their shelves of some dust collectors.