Y-Wing Pilot
Parts:
- Arvyl Crynd (from Rebel Pilots Cinema Scene) head, helmet, and torso
- A-Wing pilot (pack-in figure from A-Wing vehicle) lower body
- Ten Numb (from Rebel Pilots Cinema Scene) arms, boots, and hanging tube
- rubber bands
Here's my attempt at the Y-Wing pilots as seen in Return of the Jedi. Fans familiar with A New Hope will realize that the pilots who flew Y-Wings in that movie wore the same outfits as the X-Wing pilots.
The helmet and head are unmodified. The torso didn't fit too well on the A-Wing pilot's lower body, so I had to do some sanding inside the torso until things fit. I also cut the air hose off his chest. To make straps on the inside of the thighs and on the butt, I glued rubber bands onto the figure. By covering the outside of the rubber bands with super glue, the rubber bands hardened enough to be painted. In hindsight, I wish I'd used thinner rubber bands for his legs.
Then I repainted him with gray, black, white, and sand-color. I needed to use a good dull coat after painting, since it originally came out very glossy for some reason. After painting, I trimmed the air hose from Ten Numb and glued it on his chest.
Here's a picture of the finished Y-Wing pilot along with the other figures I used for parts:
Accuracy
If you ask me, the hardest part of doing this figure is actually finding a full-body reference picture. In the film itself, you only really see these guys from the mid-chest up.
Looking through the Return of the Jedi storybook from 1983, I found the following pictures. In the first picture, you'll see several Y-Wing pilots to the far left.
Here are some closeups of the same picture:
 
And lastly, here's a good side view of a Y-Wing pilot from the Ewok celebration, also from the ROJ storybook:
The real mystery is the chest boxes that these pilots wear. In the first reference picture it may look like the pilots have large padded chestboxes, almost like World War II parachute packs, but I suspect those are actually the pilots' helmets in their laps. It seems logical, since all the other pilots in the scene have their helmets with them, mostly in their laps. So I made an educated guess at what the chest boxes look like.
To understand my educated guess, let's dwell for a moment on the bizarre Cinema Scene figure that Hasbro named Arvyl Crynd. First, he is not Arvyl, since Arvyl is actually a non-oriental A-Wing pilot wearing green in ROJ (he's the one that flies into the super star destroyer's bridge). Second, even if he were an A-Wing pilot and Hasbro just got the color wrong, the chest box does not match what an A-Wing pilot wears. So what's going on here? Hell if I know, but I imagine that "mystery Arvyl" is actually wearing the chest box for a Y-Wing pilot (it must have come from somewhere), and Hasbro got confused somewhere along the way.
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