Red Star 47

With the desk clear I decided to tackle Indrustria Mechanika's Red Star 47. Industria Mechanika is a very good garage kit "co." with a varied stock based on the various artists. His models go from Ma.K type vehicles, to 5th Element type vehicles to all sorts of different figures of different sizes.
From IM's website:

From the mind of Christophe Desse comes the Red Star 47. This 1/35 scale Russian-styled flyer is ready for either in-flight or on-ground scenes.

Looking through Christophe's work - and there's a ton of it - I couldn't easily find his Red Star. I link his pages if you want to investigate yourself. 
Opening the box you find a number of very well done parts.  If certain spots you can see where they masters were 3d grown, but none of the grow lines show on the visible sides of the vehicle. The back page of the instructions show color renderings for 5 different paint schemes. Here are the parts - 

Started off I was charged to assemble the front grill. I hit the first snag in that the air cover holes have little spots where the PE cover is supposed to fit in. But the PE nubs to stick in the slots were to small. I had to come up with a workaround. They were all eventually installed - 

The next step was moving on to the cockpit and the main body. Then I saw something weird. On the box it says that a pilot was included. But the instructions say the pilot is optional (read - not included). I didn't want t make this flyer sitting on the ground, and didn't know how the pilot would fit in if I just kept building. Forward progress, besides cleaning the pout stubs and priming, was halted until the pilot arrived. 
Stay tuned...