Which begs the question... is the A400 body getting A310 wings?
No, the A400 is getting stre-t-ch-ed ------ so I've got another in the stash just so I can use the spare parts. Going to be a Canadian operated one and after reading a couple of Chris Gibson books just lately (Battle Flight, Air Staff & the AEW) it will have an E-3 rotordome plus palletized operating room (although I might not go to detailing that lot).
Originally what happened was, I started building a BAe 844. Which is an Airbus A310 with FASS radar system (like a Nimrod AEW). The version I'm attempting to build is this one below which if I'm following Chris Gibson's book correctly, was probably the version offered to the Saudi's. It has a cockpit area that looks very much like the A400M forward fuseage so I decided to use all the cockpit bits and forward fuselage from an A400. Which left a bunch of bits left over -- I should say just about everything else was left over
So I got the idea to do the A310/A400 hybrid to use a lot of the parts up, I was able to buy a spare A310 fuselage from Aircraft in Miniature for the project. Some of the parts will be used to detail the insides of my turbo-prop Sunderland fire-bomber, while others will be used for another project still forming in my head, but will entail a Transall fuselage, Nimrod wings and modified A400 tail
BTW, this is in 1/72 scale --