Reconnaissances was the original use of military aviation!
The ability to look over the next hill and see what your opponent was up to. During the United Sates Civil War, balloons were used to look out and observe and report what troop movements were being done.
The first uses of powered flight by military services were to observe opposing forces. The US used them in the pursuit of Pancho Villa and this was the first uses in WWI, The Great War.
Later came the adaptation of the fighter aircraft to stop the reconnaissances aircraft from getting their information back. This in-turn resulted in reconnaissance aircraft being based on the latest fighter type aircraft with cameras instead of guns.
The McDonnell RF-101A/C was of this design and as an offshoot of a fighter version, it was to far out shadow its original. The F-101A/C was designed to be a long range bomber escort for the Strategic Air Command (SAC) but just as they started making deliveries of the new fighter, SAC deciding it would not work and no longer wanted them, transferred the new fighter to Tactical Air Command (TAC). With a limited production run of only 77 F-101As and 47Cs (the main difference between an A and a C is that the A was stressed to 6.33 Gs and the C was stressed to 7.33 Gs) all assigned to the 81st TFW at Bergstrom AFB, TX as high speed tactical nuclear bombers. Not being much use in Texas, they were transferred to Bentwaters RAFB England and as a whole had a relative short lifespan.
The RF-101A/C on the other had was to have a much more lively career. Starting on 27 November 1957, TAC wanted to show off its new Thoroughbred by putting on a record breaking transcontinental speed run. From Los Angles California, to New York, New York and back again. Than in October 1960 the new reconnaissance bird over flew Cuba in support of the Cuban Missile crisis, bringing back vital photographic information on what was being done about the instillation of nuclear missiles in Cuba. Just one short year later, in October 1961, the RF-101Cs were deployed by the 67th TRS to Vietnam.
THE MODEL
Being the only version of the VooDoo family to see combat, I felt Kitty Hawk would have released it first, but they chose to release the single seat fighter F-101A/C first, and then the critics chimed in, and rightly so. For a kit that cost $80.00 plus there were a lot of mistakes. The intakes were of the version used by the two seat F-101B/F and not any version of the single seater. The Decal sheet had all the buzz numbers wrong in spite of the fact the box artwork was correct? Really? There were many other issues, some correctable some not so much by the modeler.
It took Kitty Hawk near five year to get around to the RF variants and they still got it wrong! All of the original issues and new ones, as they did not change the cockpit instrument panel! The RF version and the single seat fighter version have different IP layouts.
Well having wanted a 1/48th reccee VooDoo for decades and not really wanting to do a conversion, which would have had most all the same issues as the new production kit plus some, I bought two when they came out. I do feel I am rewarding bad behavior but what else can you do.
Print Scale came out with a set of RF-101 VooDoo decals a couple of years before Kitty Hawk announced that they would do a VooDoo line and I had purchased that set as I did have the vacuform conversion set (well two of them) but I couldn't make myself dig into that. Caracal has released two sets for the kit as well. I strongly recommend these sets if you plan on doing one.
The kit does come with two different noses, one for the A/C variants and one for the G/H. The G is an F-101A conversion and the H is a C conversion.