Monarch A321 G-ZBAO Phoenix 11057 January 2015 Release

I’m not going to mince words over this model. It’s crap.

1) Main Fuselage

For one the yellow tail colour, the dark underbody base colour are totally wrong. They got it wrong on G-MAJS and just because it was wrong on that you’d think they might not be so keen to copy the error, but they have. The nose looks like somebody might have touched it when the paint was wet. The mould is fine, the general detail, all very neat but the basic core fact of this model is that the colours are totally wrong and the general quality is poor.

2) Engines

While the shape of the engines is excellent and they are fitted well the paint is atrocious, wobbly silver lines around the intakes, dust in the wrong coloured body paint.

3) Landing Gear

Main gear is good, nose gear is slightly twisted, poorly fixed and the tyre is lumpen. VERY POOR.

4) Tail fin and stabilisers

Basically good but badly installed and looks cracked around the base because its not been fitted correctly. Shoddy.

5) Wings and underbody.

The wings are push-in and elegant, not a drop of excess paint, all the detail shows everywhere you would want, they are good example of what can be done and yet generally isn’t being done on this model.

6) Colours

I see Monarch aircraft every day, sometimes a dozen or so, and this time Phoenix, who have made colour errors in the past have sadly made the same one AGAIN. The yellow on the tail is way to orange, and frankly the Indigo blue is black.  The yellow is almost 6 Pantone shades away from where it should be. You can see the correct colours on the Gemini A320 (G-OZBX) and the marked difference on the Phoenix A321 and A300. This is caused by using photographs to verify colour rather than using official colours (Monarch don’t make this easy, but their ad agency Communique who designed the current livery were easy to track down). When you see the two together the difference is glaringly obvious.

Making colour cock ups once is not good but not the end of the world. Making them twice is ignorance and Phoenix should be ashamed of themselves for such a failure.  These models are far too expensive to be saddled with this sort of low quality both in colour and overall build. Perhaps it explains why Phoenix cut back on so much of their deliveries on these releases -retailers are reporting significant quality issues with many models.

7) Overall score.

Two colour errors = -20, The bad nosegear -10 and the cracked tail fitting and general quality -10. 60% REJECT