I'm thinking of doing something with this...
...and the sprues..
If you don't know it, the Hawk 200 was a single seat fighter variant of the pretty successful BAE (Hawker Siddeley) Hawk series of trainers. First flown in 1886, it was intended as a cheap (£3000 per flight hour) and easy to maintain light multi-role fighter. Only 69 in total were built but they're still flying today and have seen some combat with the Royal Malaysian Air Force.
To my mind I still think it's a shame that the RAF didn't pick this up, even in small numbers. I know at the time it really wasn't needed, but it would have been good for us to support out own industry (we also should have gone with the BAE EAP rather than the Eurofighter but that's another story). It might well have made a good point defence fighter for areas such as the Falklands, Belize, Hong Kong etc. whilst the more expensive aircraft were kept back in the UK and Germany as part of NATO.
So I'm going to go some form of what-if/what could have been build - marked up in RAF markings. The kit itself is pretty basic and I'm going to have to do some work on it to get it away from the prototype airframe it's based on. I'm probably not going to get any AM as that moves away from the spirit of building a Matchbox kit, so I'm just going to add a few SB bits such as pylons etc. I'm not certain yet if I'll bother with the wing tip mounts. The Hawk was a bit low on power and short legged, so I think all 7 pylons loaded might be over kill.
This is kind of what I'm aiming at (To my mind it is such a nice looking profile). I have some penguin anti-ship missiles that might look good. I might also build it in flight. I'll certainly have to add an RWR to the tail, and some other bits including the outer pylons
With maybe markings like this...
Oh this will be good.
I wonder what stopped them from entering it? The Hawk is a superb Trainer with a proven history (and is already being used by the USN).