Sarathi S.

That is very common to do, especially out in Yuma

Concur Ski, pretty sure closing doors is mostly an "it's cold" thing, i.e. East Coast or occasional UDP thing.

Pretty sure you can close the doors with guns installed, but I'm not sure if the kit will allow that.

No idea, safe guess is after the investigation is completed.

As Tank said both Werner's Wings and Flying leathernecks have decals for 369, you should be able to cobble together the particular markings (BuNo, side number) for Gunfighter 41.

Absolutely love the detail you're putting in!

Looks great, but did you mean to post the second image?

Great work! Love the minigun wiring.

Looks good, paint callouts are partially wrong though. Darker color on the upper surfaces is FS35237, not 36320

Double flare buckets came about 5 years after the turned exhausts, so there was a decent chunk of time where Whiskeys were still flying around with the old buckets.

Are you saying a Hellfire launcher on one outboard wing station and a LAU-61 on the other outboard? Because yeah that should be doable. Having the two adjacent would most likely require at least one of the Hellfire rails to be empty.

AH-1W exhaust soot: protecting OPSEC since 1986

The W and Z use the same turret, the Italeri kit is simple because it's inaccurate, not because there's a shape difference between the two. The only difference (covered in Mason Doupnik's book) is that later Ws didn't have the center fairing around the gun because of the IZLID mount. Also as you can see in Gino's picture, the bottom of the gun turret isn't blanked off, it's open.

PMA never got any actual meaningful progress on Longbow integration on the Zulu, nor is it anywhere on their list of priorities. At this point it's a stretch to even say the Zulu has AGM-114L capability, since the only thing that is actually viable is physically mounting the missiles on the rails. (Which tracks, because to my knowledge the Longbow never got anything beyond a fitment check) As for the Dream Model kit having a bunch of Z parts, I'm pretty sure it's because their Z kit was released before their W.

I love to see the oil cooler modeled, as someone who has to deal with it all too frequently for work. One thing to note though, the oil coolers on W, Y, and Z model are painted Flat Black (FS 37038). It's great to see that you even got the colored nuts on the hyd line fittings.