F-104 Starfighter in Greece and Spain Set

The Starfighter on the southern wing of the Alliance

The Lockheed F-104 came out of a requirement for a machine that would climb highest and fastest. A wafer-thin trapezoidal wing with a leading edge so sharp that it was covered with a protective strip on the ground, a slim fuselage wrapped around a General Electric J79 engine and a minimum of everything else: that was the aircraft whose European version, the F-104G, was given a strengthened structure, richer avionics and the ability to attack ground targets as well.

The Greeks took their first machines into service in 1964 and gradually added aircraft taken over from other users; the last of them left the flight line at the beginning of the 1990s. The Spanish had single-seat and two-seat Starfighters from the mid-1960s for roughly seven seasons and returned them without a single loss in an accident. On a type that elsewhere earned a reputation as an unforgiving aircraft, that was a result people still talk about today.

ATOM paints are built on an acrylic binder, are thinned with water or with their own thinner and are prepared above all for an airbrush. They are laid down in thin, at first semi-transparent coats, which build up over several passes into a covering tone. A cured coat has a smooth matte surface on which decals bed down without silvering and washes flow the way they should.

Before you start it is worth rolling the bottle in your hand for a while so that the settled pigment returns into the binder. Light aircraft grays come out best on a white or a very light base, while darker tones will also take a gray base.