1/48 Kylie's Ki-43-1
Hasegawa 1/48 Kylie's Ki-43-1

Finished, Hasegawa 1/48 Kylie's Ki-43-I Hayabusa.

The Ki-43 Hayabusa was an aircraft used by the Imperial Japanese Army Air Force (IJAAF) during the Second World War. Having a similar silhouette to its more famous naval cousin the A6M Reisen, the Ki-43 was a small but incredibly maneuverable aircraft, even more so than the famous Zero. The version depicted here is an early Ki-43-I model, with original engine and two bladed propeller. Armament was initially 2x 7.7mm machine guns, but this was later upgraded to a pair of 12.7mm machine guns, when the new weapons became available.

This kit specifically depicts Kylie's Hayabusa from the new anime series "Kouya no Kotobuki Hikoutai" (The Magnificent Kotobuki). The series follows the exploits of the Kotobuki squadron, an all women group of mercenary pilots who fly escort missions for giant airships, amongst other odd jobs.


Building the kit was fairly straightforward as this is a well engineered Hasegawa kit, and a fairly small aircraft. construction began as is almost always the case with the cockpit. I mostly painted this interior green, with aluminium used for the chair and other parts, and used red-brown for the seat cushions I made from blu-tack. The console was painted simply in black and had the kit decals applied over the top. This cockpit section is then sandwiched between the fuselage halves which themselves have cockpit wall detailing added to them. Once this is all assembled, the aircraft is lowed onto the wing assembly, which is made from a large lower part, individual upper parts for each wing, and then two part wing tips which join to the end. The fit was reasonable but there were some gaps I had to fill (using PPP, perfect plastic putty).

I added the horizontal stabilizers, as well as painting the area around the cockpit and adding the headrest and telescopic gun sight. following this I masked the canopy using the masks I bought, and fitted that into place using clearfix glue, to avoid fogging the canopy. To also aid in that I dipped the canopy in pledge floor gloss to improve its clarity and give it a glassy shine.

I also added the pitot tube to the wing, built and painted the engines & exhausts, and fitted those into place, followed by the nose of the aircraft.

I made the decision to paint the majority of the aircraft before making the landing gear, and so masked off the engine in the nose to stop paint getting in. I painted the colour I wanted the interior of the canopy frame to be, and followed it with an all over black primer in preparation for the metallic aluminium. I added this next, then masked off and painted a black anti-glare strip along the nose, and yellow wing marks. On the underside I masked and painted the gear bay in faded emerald, which was the closest colour I had to the correct one. I also unmasked the engine area and painted the rim of the nose which had been missed in the initial painting. I also painted the external canopy frame colour.

With the painting of the main aircraft done I moved on to building and painting the landing gear, this required some tricky masking of the gear bay doors in order to get the yellow stripe on them, but I managed it ok, and I think the result looks reasonable. After the landing gear was built and painted I stuck it into place. This just left a couple of bits to touch up, such as adding the antenna, repainting the exhausts, and adding a metallic black dab inside the holes for the 12.7mm machine guns. Following this the aircraft was fully built and almost completely painted.

Next step was to add coats of Pledge floor polish as a gloss in preparation for the extensive decals. These were very large as the camouflage of the aircraft was made from the decals, which on the one hand made it much easier to paint, but on the other hand meant I had to put on lots of large tricky decals. Suffice it to say I did manage this in the end, better than I expected honestly, and the resulting camo looks pretty good. After allowing the decals time to dry, I finished off the painting completely by adding the wing tip navigation lights, and followed up with a final coat of pledge to seal everything in, and once this was dry removed the canopy masks to reveal the finished aircraft.

The kit also included a little acrylic... stand? figure? cut-out? of Kylie, so I put it next to the aircraft in the pictures and I will probably display it like this on my shelf.

All in all, despite a few gap problems this was a very nice kit to make. The painting was not too complicated, and the only really awful part was the decals. But I managed even them in the end, and it was definitely worth it to create Kylie's version of this lovely aircraft.

Happy Building!