As advertised, Eduard recently released its Royal Class P-51D Mustang Dual Combo boxing. With this release, Eduard provides the 110 and 165 gallon drop tanks and two decal options for Iwo Jima VLR Mustangs. Consistent with Eduard’s practice of including extra “goodies” in with their Royal Class boxings, Eduard does not disappoint with this release. In addition to the two complete kits, Eduard has thrown in an unpainted PSP (Marsden mats) display base for those who enjoy dioramas, and some nice Brassin products: shrouded and unshrouded exhaust stacks, and two pairs of wheels randomly chosen between diamond, cross, block and oval treads.

110 & 165 Gallon Drop Tanks: Eduard did an excellent job on reproducing in 1/48 scale the 110 and 165 gallon drop tanks used on VLR missions, and they included the sway braces. Finally, a model manufacturer gets it completely right!

Not wanting to wait until I started a new build with Eduard’s kit, I removed the drop tank pieces from the sprue, cleaned them up, and put them together just to see how they look. Below is a photo of the Eduard 110 gallon tank, and a photo of the actual tank. Judge for yourself on how well Eduard did.

Eduard appears to have captured the contours, shape and size of the 110 gallon tanks really well. The flat portion on the top of the tank is represented well, as is the other adjacent detail. Please note the raised lines just below the flat portion of the tank. It appears that Eduard has incorporated them on both sides of the tanks to aid the modeler in positioning the sway braces on the tanks. This should make it much easier to install the sway braces when positioning between the tanks and the wings, and since the raised lines are fairly light, you should not notice them on the completed model. Extremely nice and well thought out with the modeler in mind. So do not sand off these raised lines!

The 165 gallon drop tanks look equally nice. However, instead of the raised lines as an alignment aid for the sway braces, Eduard has instead built in slots for the sway braces on each side of the tank. I test fit one of the sway braces, and they appear to fill the slots completely without the need of any putty to fill any gaps. We will see how well they work when we get into the build. Again, kudos to Eduard and their design team in having the modeler in mind when engineering the installation of the sway braces.

Iwo Jima VLR Mustang Decals: Eduard has included two decal options for Iwo Jima VLR Mustangs, both of the 506th Fighter Group. The first is 555 “The Ole Lady/Little Anne/My Darlin Betty Ann” (P-51D-25-NA, 44-72628), a 458th FS Mustang flown by 2nd Lts. James E. Coleman and Ralph R. Coltman, Jr.

The second is 528 “The Enchantress” (P-51D-25-NA, 44-72671), a 457th FS Mustang flown by 2nd Lt. William E. Saks. 2nd Lt. Saks was one of the pilots lost on the June 1, 1945 “Black Friday” mission, but was not flying 528 on that day. “The Enchantress” is popular amongst modelers because the nose art and pin-up girl that adorns the fuselage.

Along with the release of the Royal Class Dual Combo boxing, Eduard also released a separate Overtrees boxing with just the P-51D VLR Drop Tanks (Cat. No 82109X) should you want to build multiple Iwo Jima VLR Mustangs, or convert another manufacturer’s 1/48 P-51D Mustang to a VLR Mustang. In addition, Eduard announced the January 2020 release of both the 110 and 165 gallon VLR drop tanks as resin upgrades as part of their Brassin line. Lastly, Eduard announced the release of a Pacific Theater VLR Profipack boxing for August 2020. Sometimes I have to pinch myself just to make sure that I am not dreaming. Life is good!