# 1/72nd scale ETO late war P-51 ?'s.



## Pete McKay (Dec 20, 2006)

I'm getting ready to do a project for my IPMS club and this one seems to have even stumped the resident experts. I plan on doing between 8 and 12 P-51D's of the 351st Fighter Group known as the yellow noses. I have a lot of documentation on the aircraft s/n's and names, ID numbers and such, but I have conflicting color pics on cockpit interior colors. Even the doc's with the decal sheets fail to mention it on the specific aircraft they supply the markings for.

Two of my pics show them a sort of green zinc chromite, which is what I do most of my WW2 aircraft with, but there's two aircraft which seem to either have a dark gray or black cockpit. I'm going to do these assembly line style and all of them will be the same except for the subtle differences like rudder color and how the yellow breaks on the nose, but all of the interiors were going to be the same.

Has anyone else seen or heard of personalized cockpit paints on ETO late war fighters like this? The book is by a well known authority and the picture is an obvious scan of a very old picture from someones collection, I've just never seen cockpit walls and head rests done in anything but Zinc Green before.


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## John P (Sep 1, 1999)

Never heard of such a thing myself. I can't imagine depot-level or squadron-level maintenance even bothering to repaint a cockpit interior. Would a pilot even be allowed to? Seems like a whole lot of effort - I imagine, aside from a ton of masking, it would require stripping out a lot of components.

The only thing I can think of is that the factory ran out out of green ZC and used a substitute occasionally?


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## surfsup (Apr 19, 2009)

There are a few occassions where this has happened. Some A/C Interiors were painted Chromate Yellow. On other times, Aircraft slated for a different Customer had Interiors painted to their requirements. I know some US A/C had their Interiors painted Bronze Green. I have never heard of US A/C painted any other Colour though........Cheers Mark


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## John P (Sep 1, 1999)

The only variations I'm aware of is Republic Aviation had their own forest-greenish interior color for the P-47s.


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## djnick66 (May 2, 2008)

Mustang cockpits are interior green with a black seat and black painted wood floor. Wheel wells are zinc chromate yellow. Few WW2 cockpits were zinc chromate yellow. The Thunderbolt was dull dark green but again had zinc chromate yellow wheel wells.


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