Canadair Sabre Mk.4

My 5th lockdown aircraft mode build!

For as long I can remember, the one non-british made aircraft which has fascinated me more than any other has been the North American F-86 Sabre.

Based on the design of captured Messerschmitt 262s at the end of WW2, the F-86 Sabre entered service with the USAF in 1949, one year before the Korean War in which it proved its exceptional capabilities in combat against the Russian Mig 15, also heavily influenced in its swept wing design by the Me 262. One interesting factoid about these two jets was the distinguishing characteristics of their engines which made it very easy to distinguish, from some distance, which was friend or foe. The F-86 was powered by a General Electric power plant and the Mig used a reverse engineered Rolls Royce Nene engine which the British government had crazily gifted to Stalin in the early post war years! The Sabre left a smoke trail a Red Arrow would have been proud of, while the Mig’s exhaust was smoke free .. quality British engineering!

I’ve made more model kits of the Sabre jet than I care to remember but never this variant. This is the 1952, the Canadair Sabre Mk.4 which served with the RAF until mid-1956 when they were replaced by Hawker Hunters. Britain needed to look to the United States at this time as it had no jet fighter capable of standing up to the Mig-15. During the Korean War, British jet fighters, such as the famed Doodlebug chasing Gloster Meteor, were found to be inferior to the Mig. Britain was actually supplied with Sabres via Canada, who built the Sabre under licence and gave it the designation of the Canadair CL-13.

Canadair Sabre Mk.4 112 Squadron RAF

The colours of this model is probably that of one delivered in Jan 1954 to No 112 (F) Squadron, RAF Bruggen, W. Germany. 112 Squadron’s aircraft carried Shark’s teeth beneath the nose and a white fin letter. The use of shark teeth date back to 1941, when inspired by the unusually large air inlet on their P-40 Curtiss Tomahawk, the squadron copied the "shark's mouth" logo painted on some German Messerschmitt Bf 110s seen earlier in the war. This practice was later followed by P-40 units in other parts of the world, including the Flying Tigers, American volunteers serving with the Chinese Air Force and most recently, my last build of the Desert Storm Tornado.

Sabres eventually equipped 10 RAF fighter squadrons in Germany and 2 in the UK as part of NATO's 2nd Allied Air Force; their main task was to patrol the Air Defence Identification Zone along the "Iron Curtain" and standing on alert to be scrambled to intercept unidentified aircraft. Until replaced by Hawker Hunters 1955-6 they provided air cover for the defences of Western Germany and the Rhine Army.

My picture of the F-86 taken in 2011 at the Duxford Korean War Airshow

There are a couple movies in which you get to see the F-86 in action but none, in my view, better than 1958’s The Hunters, staring Robert Mitchum and Robert Wagner, set In 1952, during the Korean War. The air scenes are fantastic, obviously using real aircraft with smoking engines and not a model in sight!