If you are wondering what’s going on with the cockpit floor, there’s a wee story there! I test fitted the ejection seat and low and behold it sat too high for the canopy to close correctly. Not a problem if you are going to leave this open, but I think it spoils the lines of the aircraft hinged open from the nose, plus it’s just asking to get broken off at some later date, so I want it closed.
Time for some remedial action with the trusty Dremmel, and very carefully does it too!!
The canopy clarity is excellent and with a dip in Alclad Aqua Gloss it certainly will draw the eye. The masking of the inside frames is a little tricky, which then gets a coat of flat black. The exterior is painted to match our combing surround with LAG, and then finished in a light sheen.
Artistic license
This is where I play the artistic license card again, turning our future of naval aviation into a British subject. So here are my assumptions of what one will resemble.
Firstly, low observable roundels and tail flashes, not the kit-supplied boring gray on gray affairs, proper UK passport holding roundels courtesy of my spares box, a fair assumption I believe.
Secondly, retain the gray intake stencils and warnings, but lose the low visibility ejection seat symbol and hazard triangles for the pylons, I believe our Royal Navy and RAF will stick with their time honoured red and white highly visible versions, along with the ‘escape’ stencils in traditional yellow and black. 
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Thirdly, a clear Royal Navy in white on the tail and because we have no NAS allocated yet, a simple RN FAA aviation wings in gold on the tail.
Believe me I seriously considered a red tail and the diamond symbol reminiscent of the Phantoms of Ark Royal, or the Harriers of Invincible, but thought this too brazen this time out of the box.
One last liberty, this is a ‘Lightning II’ so for me we had to reflect this pedigree in some way, so it may not be obvious to all but the tail code of AJ and the airframe number of XS refers to a 5 Sqn Lightning F6, the real F35K’s all hold ZM prefixes, the latest delivery being ZM137 just this last month to the trials unit currently operational in the USA.
Cheeky, perhaps – but looks ‘right’ to me.
Just a quick word on the kit-supplied decals, they look a first glance to be heavy, but they actually go down really well. There are only a few stencils, so you may have to rummage in the spares box to detail up the inner faces of all those doors. If I had one ‘moan’ to have on the decals, it’s that they are on a very small sheet and are packed very closely together, making it a tedious chore to separate them out.
If you are wondering where all my extra decals came from, they are primarily from the Airfix Lynx kit, an Italeri Hawk T1 and an Xtra Decal sheet for the Binbrook Lightning F6’s.