As soon as I saw the first pictures of the new MiG aircraft on the Internet, I was keen to make a model of it to add to my collection of Russian aircraft. It also shares a birthday with me (well at least a roll-out day) as it was revealed to the public on 12 January 1999.

Lots of photos were released – http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hangar/5634/mfi.html and http://www.internews.ru/~pechenkin/MIG-35.html – and they showed the aircraft to be a large delta-winged design with a huge chin intake feeding the twin engines, twin canted fins, ventral fins with rudders and a forward fuselage mounted high above the intakes with large shoulder-mounted canards incorporating a dogtooth.

One final point on the aircraft’s designation. Its mission is that of a multi-role fighter hence the MFI title, which stands in Russian for Mnogofunktsional’ny Fontovoj Istrebitel (Multifunctional Tactical Fighter) . It has also been called 1.42 or 1.44, the explanation being that 1.42 is the whole PROGRAMME, 1.44 being the actual aircraft itself. I don’t know whether this is true or not, but here in the UK, MFI has unfortunate connotations, as it is the name of a large supplier of self-assembly furniture that has become the butt of a lot of jokes involving inadequate instructions and leftover parts !

However, on to the actual hardware……….

Although there were plenty of photographs, there was a distinct lack of drawings. I eventually collected three – all of them different. The first was from Piotr Butowski published in Combat Aircraft, another appeared in Air International (March 1999 Vol 56 No 3) credited to John Weal and the last and best in my opinion were those from a Polish publication – Nowa Technika Wojskowa 3/99 (ISSN 1230-1655). My thanks go to Pawel Bondaryk for supplying the latter.

Published Dimensions are :- length overall - 21.7m, length without probe - 20.5m and wingspan 16.5m.

I scaled up all three drawings on a photocopier using the span as a reference and discovered that the Piotr Butowski drawing was far too long in the fuselage, the John Weal drawing was slightly too short and had a curious kink at the wing root leading edge. The Polish drawings were just right - with the relationship between span and length being correct. (Does this remind anyone of a certain story involving three bears ?)

I ended up using, of all things, an old KP 1:72 scale Sukhoi Su-7 Fitter for the main fuselage. The Su-7 has a bulged rear end that matches the waisted appearance on the 1.44. It is obviously far too narrow, so after the fin was removed and the fuselage shortened, it was widened by the simple expedient of adding rectangular sections of plastic card to the top and bottom of the KP fuselage halves.

The top and bottom of the 1.44 fuselage look to be fairly flat, but it dips down between the exhaust nozzles, so this was modelled by cementing a plastic card bulkhead to the extreme rear end and adding circular sections taken from the leftover nose of the Su-7.

The front end of the 1.44 fuselage looks like a MiG-29 in profile, although it is a lot wider in plan. An Airfix MiG-29 front fuselage was utilised, being cut in half just forward of the chaff dispenser boxes. Crescent-shaped pieces were removed from the LERX’s to match the 1.44 plans.

I haven’t the faintest idea of what a MiG 1.44 cockpit looks like, and I doubt if anyone else does this side of Zhukovsky does, so I used the Airfix MiG-29 cockpit tub and ejection seat suitably painted in pale blue-grey and black respectively.

The top and bottom of the Fulcrum nose were scraped to a thinner profile – taking care not to go all the way through the plastic and plastic card chines were added to widen the nose in plan view to match the drawings.

Rectangles of plastic card were used to make the prominent shoulder mounts for the canards and scraps of plastic card and sprue were cemented to the nose fill it out to roughly the final shape.

Milliput – a two-part epoxy putty available in the UK – was then added to the nose section to create the final shape. Milliput has the advantage of being able to be worked with a wet finger, so that the shape can be achieved before it dries. Once the Milliput had dried, it was sanded and carved to the final shape. I had to make a couple of applications to achieve the desired shape – but the results can be seen below.

The MiG 1.44 has a large box-like intake that blends into the rear fuselage, on top of which sits the forward fuselage. There is a large boundary layer diverter between the intake and forward fuselage and I figured that this would be easier to make and blend in without the intake in place. A thick piece of plastic card was cut to a wedge shape with a parallel section that fits inside the rear fuselage. This was cemented onto the lower nose section and inside the fuselage to give added strength to the nose/fuselage joint.

The whole nose to fuselage joint was now made good with liberal applications of Milliput to blend the whole thing in at the top and bottom, including the diverter plate.

The box-like intakes were made from plastic card using the drawings as a guide to their shape.

There are three flow straighteners at the forward end of the intake between the intake top and the lower nose – these were added from plastic card before the finished intake was cemented to the nose.

I cast around in my spares box for some appropriate nozzles and came up empty. A few people have mentioned Gloster Javelin wings, others the Avro Arrow – I don’t know if they would do or not. Then, at a model show, I was looking around for a donor kit to supply the wings and I happened upon an old Esci 1:48 scale F-4 Phantom kit which, when compared with my drawings, showed that the wings could be used – more on that later. As an added bonus, the exhaust nozzles proved to be about the right diameter, if a little short in length. They were slightly wider than my rear fuselage, so two plastic card discs, the same diameter as the Phantom nozzles, were cut out and cemented to the rear end of the fuselage.

Milliput was applied to the underside of the fuselage and around the exhaust discs to blend in the underside ‘steps’ and create a dished shape between the nozzles on the top and bottom rear fuselage. The Intakes were also blended in to create the final shape.

I had already added the front end of the spine from some leftover Milliput. The rear spine with its vertical knife-edge was made using an 8mm dia. plastic knitting needle.

This was cemented in place and blended in with Milliput.

The finished fuselage looks like this...

The light grey areas are the original Su-7 fuselage and MiG-29 nose, the white areas are plastic card, the khaki colour is Milliput and the green area is Green Stuff.

As mentioned above, I used the wings from a 1:48 scale F-4 , but others donor kits may be even better. The Phantom wing was placed over the drawings – Photo 31 and the appropriate cuts made –

The phot above right shows the wings before and after surgery. Because my kit was a US Navy F-4B/J, I had to sand down the wheel bulges as much as I dared, taking care not to go right through the plastic. The slots for the pylons were filled in and the upturned wingtips were bent straight and re-glued in place. The F-4 panel lines were filled with Green Stuff and new MiG panel lines scribed on - I restricted myself to just the control surfaces and leading edge slats.

The Phantom kit provided the tailplanes from which I cut the canards – again using the drawings to get the outline shape. Photo 36 shows the before and after views.

The ventral fins were made from the MiG-29 kits’ tailplanes.

and the Fulcrum kit also provided the vertical fins.

I added the windscreen and canopy from the MiG-29 and blended them in with filler. Two intakes were made from two missile noses and attached to the upper fuselage on either side of the spine. A short length of tubing was inserted into the extreme nose and faired in with filler. The model was now ready for painting. The prototype MiG 1.44 at the January 12 rollout was painted in a two-tone scheme of pale blue undersides and mid-grey uppers with black dielectric panels, nose and anti-glare panel.

Being a lazy sort of modeller I resorted to a couple of Aerosol spray cans from the Halfords acrylic car paints range – Ford Bermuda Blue for the undersides and Ford Polar Grey for the uppers. The purists and colour police may have appoplexy, but the colours look a reasonable match to me and it saved me having to mix paints and get out the airbrush. I also used Halfords semi-gloss black for the black areas.

When the paint was dry and I removed all the masking, I was horrified to see that there was some dust and flecks of plastic shavings trapped inside the cockpit canopy !! Try as I might I could not dislodge it from the canopy roof and it stuck out like a sore thumb. After a lot of agonising, I eventually took my courage in my hands and carefully sawed off the faired-in canopy taking care not to scratch the paintwork. I was lucky and did not damage the canopy too much, so it was cleaned up and cemented in a slightly open position – no more sealed canopies for me !

The main undercarriage bays on my model are represented by very dark grey paint – I didn’t make real recesses for fear of damaging the fuselage. The undercarriage was attached and the doors added – I think I may have got them hanging too vertical – the doors on the real thing are almost horizontal, so I may have to do some fixing. The markings were obtained from the spares box – six red stars, a bort number of ‘Blue 01’ on the intakes and a MiG logo on either side of the nose. I didn’t add the many small air data probes around the nose, but the distinctive ‘toasting fork’ probe on the nose was made and added to the previously made nose tube. A small retractable panel containing two taxi lights is visible alongside the noseleg , so this was fabricated and added, but I chickened out of making the two large vents/intakes on either side of the forward spine. I cheated and made small covers from red plastic card . Red card was also used to make blanking plates for the main intakes.

The finished model may not be 100% accurate – but it is as accurate as the best available drawings – and it is more accurate than some commercial kits I have seen.

Below: MiG 1.44 alongside Sukhoi S-37 for comparison

Happy Modelling !