Correcting The Aurora Flying Sub

[ewahl]

My two all-time favorite improbable Hollywood machines are the Flying Sub from "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" and KITT from the original "Knight Rider." KITT has been completed, but the Flying Sub remains elusive. I haul it out and make progress before finding another block that need to be hurdled. This repeats again and again. So here's what I've done so far.

 

If the designers at Aurora ever went to the Hollywood set of the Flying Sub and took reference photos, the kit they produced would never prove it. Almost everything inside and some of the outside needs to be replaced with scratchbuilt corrected items.

 

All of this is work on an original issue of the kit, and not on a repop by Monogram. Originally I started by drilling out the lights in the kit's instrument panels, covered the back of the openings with chips of various colors of clear plastic. I was going to light them from behind with flashlight bulbs screwed into sockets and wired somehow into the engine room. I felt the panels were wrong somehow, but I had no references beyond memories of the episodes from the 1960's. Enter the Sci-Fi Channel in the 1980's with reruns of the episodes and the new VCR I used to tape them. Horrors! Wverything I was doing on that kit was wrong. I used the freeze frame feature whenever I saw a partial or full view of a panel and made sketches of the instruments. They were all on a single page, as follows:

 

 

The outer hull is primed and taped together. I removed all traces of the arresting hook and lower access panel because they were never seen in the show. The foil is a light shield for the illuminated floor deck above. I have widened the front opening to show a point at each end.

 

 

I enlarged the front windows to remove the inaccurate small windows with the rubber gasket frames. I made the new windows from the clear plastic on a cassette tape cover. Note the extended tips on the frame piece as compared to the original.

 

 

Other than a blob that was supposed to be a TV monitor, there was no front instrument panel detail whatsoever in the kit. I added all the details per my sketch above. I used the details from the 1:1 set rather than the slightly different version of the panel used for the matted front view looking out shots.

 

 

I discovered the floor deck had three lighted hexagon panels around the hexagon floor hatch. I carefully scribed the outlines of the hexagons and cut them out. I cut matching clear inserts from a broken fluorescent ceiling light cover for the texture.

 

 

There are 18 1.5-volt minilamps in the three hexagons, one per side. All these wires will end up in the engine room. Foil on the hull below kills the light leaks.

 

 

All five of the kit's side wall panels were pure fiction on the part of Aurora. They did not come remotely close to the panels on the set.

 

 

Shown in the same position with respect to the originals above are the corrected panels.

 

 

I scratchbuilt new hatch covers for the top and bottom exterior units to replace the simple handwheel on the top only. The bottom has a slot for the display stand. The two instrument panels are mounted on either side of the forward window framing. Usually we saw only the backs of them, but occasionally, just occasionally, we could see the instrument side. The 20 yellow lights scrolled down the edge in groups of five. I've included some fiber optics for those lights.

 

 

The matter of scale enters in as well. The Monogram box says the kit is 1/60 scale. Look carefully at the seated figure of Admiral Nelson next to the door at the rear of the cabin. He fills the doorway in a seated posture. On screen he wasn't even as tall as the door when standing. For comparison, note the 1/72 scale seated figure, which is more in scale with the door. I believe that the only pieces in 1/60 scale were the two pilots and their chairs, with everything else at 1/72 scale. The stair rungs on the central ladder, for example are designed for a 1/72 step height.

 

 

Because of a restriction on the number of images I can insert into a post, see Part 2 of this post for the rest of the story.

 

Ed Wahl