Air Corps Fairchilds

Mick

Mick

SOH-CM-2025
I was perusing an old issue of Skyways last evening and I came on a photo spread about the Fairchild YF-1, which is what the Army Air Corps originally called the Fairchild 71. (That was F for Photo, not Fighter; the P was already in use for Pursuit.) features photos of the plane on wheels and floats, in the old olive drab fuselage livery and the later scheme with blue fuselages. Mr. Google provided a few more pictures. So I dug out James Hefner's Fairchild 71 and limbered up my paint brush.

Nothing spectacular, but welcome in my Golden Wings hangar.

 
The Fairchild 71 was procured by the Army in small numbers but it lasted a long time in service. Photos showing the old rear fuselage data block date to before late 1930, and he 71 was supposedly manufactured through 1929. One source says the plane remained in service until 1947. If correct, that would make it t he longest-serving American military aircraft of its generation with a service life of eighteen years. It wasn't until around 1960 that the C-47/R4D broke that record, and it wasn't until the second or third generation (depending on how you count generations) of jets that service lives of twenty years or more became common.

I was tempted to put the plane in WW2 livery but there are some very tricky bits to painting the plane - the mapping distorts what's on the textures in one way when they dress the fuselage and tail, and another way on the wings. I'm not interested enough in wartime liveries to deal with that, so I figured I'd leave it with the Golden Age skins.

The Navy bought just one F71. I would've loved to paint it, but I couldn't find a photo to work from.
 
I dug a little deeper and found references on the Navy's two Fairchild camera planes (I first thought there was just one,) an FC-2 designated XFQ-1, and an F71 designated XF2Q-1. Alas, the texture mapping makes it impossible to paint them accurately in the Navy's colors of the time, since in those days the stabilizer tops were yellow, and it's impossible to paint the top and bottom different colors; there is only one pair of stab surfaces on the textures and they color both top and bottom. Worse, a mapping error makes it impossible to paint one of the ailerons different colors on the top and bottom, even though the textures supposedly provide for that. I'm tempted to live with the bottoms of the stabilizers the wrong color, or to make the tops silver, on speculation that the planes remained in service a few years, until the Navy removed the yellow from the stab tops, (and that they bothered to repaint the stabs on these one-off types that were never procured for service use.) But the yellow bottom on one aileron, or even on both, looks just to weird to me. I only tested the F-71 model, and today I will see if the glitch is repeated on the FC-2, but since the basic textures are the same, I expect to find that the mapping is the same as well. I hope the glitch isn't repeated, because the plane would look great in overall silver with yellow on top of the wings, and maybe on the top of the stabilizers, and the red-white-blue rudder. We'll see...

EDIT: I did the experiments and found that the mapping errors on the FC-2 models are even worse than on the F71. On the FC-2 both sides of both flaps are mapped to one side of one flap on the texture files, along with the same mapping glitch on the ailerons as on the F71. So we can't have a Navy XFQ-1 or XF2Q-1 skin.
 
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