Thomas-Morse MB-3 Prototype AS.40093 United States Army Air Service

These are 1/72 scale decals for the Thomas-Morse MB-3 Prototype, serial AS.40093, United States Army Air Service — evaluated at McCook Field as Project P-66, the original prototype of America's first domestically designed and produced pursuit fighter, first flown in 1919.

McCook Field, located near Dayton, Ohio, was the U.S. Army Air Service's primary aeronautical engineering and flight test facility in the years immediately following World War I — the direct institutional ancestor of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and the cradle of American military aviation research and development. Under the Air Service's project numbering system, the MB-3 prototype was designated Project P-66, one of dozens of experimental aircraft evaluated at McCook as the Army sought to define the future of American airpower in the postwar era.

The MB-3 was designed by Thomas-Morse Aircraft of Ithaca, New York, and represented a clean-sheet American approach to pursuit fighter design — moving beyond the wartime reliance on French SPAD and Nieuport designs to establish a genuinely domestic fighter capability. Powered by a Wright H-3 (Hispano-Suiza) water-cooled engine and armed with twin synchronized machine guns, the MB-3 prototype demonstrated sufficient promise at McCook Field to win a production contract, ultimately leading to an order for 200 MB-3As — awarded to Boeing in one of that company's earliest significant military contracts — and service with frontline pursuit units including the 1st Pursuit Group.

The essential origin subject for the MB-3 family and a rare piece of early American aviation history from the legendary test fields of McCook. Please allow some time for decal printing and shipping.