I’ll rate this JC Lufthansa in 10 categories.
This 2022 edition uses JC’s notorious generic orange box design. Yet, this design is very easy and safe to unbox the model. So, I can take this boring design. The model is well protected by the foam. I’ll give an 8. This 346 comes with magnetic landing gear and a display stand. It also has a card for the real plane’s specs. The gear door covers are far from perfect. The nose door cover cannot sit in far enough and therefore has this very ugly gap. The center one however sits in too far. They’re worse than those of the Cathay 346 that we unboxed in another video. The plane looks very handsome in flight mode on the stand. I’ll only give a 7.
This JC mould is very good. You simply can’t find any obvious flaws in it. The shape of the wings and the winglets are much better than those of other brands’ A330s & A340s models. It has made a correct 346 unique tail. It has a tiny curve at the bottom of the rudder making room for extreme maneuvers. This mould gets it right. I’ll give a 9.
These two pairs of Trent 500 are very realistic. The flat curve at the bottom is in the correct shape. The fan blades are in good shape and in the correct scale. I’ll give a 9. The wings and the horizontal stabilizers are very well attached. The four engines are well aligned and have very good ground clearance. The seam between the vertical stabilizer and the fuselage is almost invisible. I’ll say it deserves a 9 for build.
It’s easy to put on the gears. The gear legs and joints are very well made. And this batch has purposely coloured the gear legs in silver. The main gears can tilt and they look very cool in these landing positions. I’ll give a 9. The aerials, navigation lights, SATCOM, and APU exhaust are all very well made. The APU exhaust looks very detailed. Alike the real Lufthansa fleet, the cockpit window frames are kept in the original metal colour instead of painted in white. But there’s no landing lights on the nose gear leg. I’ll give an 8.
The Lufthansa livery here is almost perfect. All the titles and logos are correctly recreated. I don’t see any flaws or mistakes. I will give a 9. For painting, let’s use Aviationtag’s real Lufthansa A346 aircraft skin as our colour reference here. It looks that the paints applied here are darker than the real colours on the skins. But this time, I think the colours on the skin tags were affected by natural weathering of the retired plane. So, I think JC managed to get the correct colours. However, the painting of the grey bottom is problematic. You see, the line is not horizontal and makes the plane look weird. So, I’ll give an 8 for painting.
There have been very few 1/200 A340-600 models available in the market. JC released both Cathay and Lufthansa in 2022 and they had been all sold out in a split second. The demand for Lufthansa A346 has always been high in Europe. I’ll give a 9.
I’ll give this JC Lufthansa A346 a total of 85 points in my ARAIG Index.
#unboxing #gemini200 #lufthansa #aviationtags
