Scale aircraft modeling blog
Every year in May we commemorate the anniversary of the Prague uprising and the end of World War Two in Europe. This year I managed to finish the Arado Ar 396 from the uprising in 1945, which became the first Czechoslovak plane flying over the Czech country after a long occupation.
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Last year, IBG Models produced another piece of their Crusader family, this time an anti-aircraft version of this famous tank, which could not be missed in my collection. It’s a 40 mm Bofors gun mounted on the Crusader Mk.III chassis. I consider the IBGs Crusader one of the best small-scale British tank model kits on the market.
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In my previous article about Caudron C.450, I promised that the next in line will be its successor, Caudron C.460. It didn’t take long and I’ve put the box with the model on my table and started modeling.
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I started the build of the Hummel (“bumblebee”), Siebel’s eye-catchy sports airplane design last autumn and recently returned to it after a long pause. This shortrun model kit doesn’t look too inviting in the box, but surprisingly the build was really not that bad.
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The type F-104G was widely used by NATO members in the seventies. It was also manufactured under license in some of those countries. The biggest number of planes was used by the German Luftwaffe. However, my choice is the F-104G of Koninklijke Luchtmacht. Netherlands had 139 Starfighters in total, mostly from their own manufacturing (Fokker). Their duty was quite boring, but I found one interesting event: the 322 squadron participated in an anti-terrorist action.
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Alois Šmolík’s design of Letov Š.20 was a standard fighter plane of the Czechoslovak Air Force during the 1920s. Its demilitarised version, which was utilized by the Hanácký flying club in the Moravian city of Olomouc between 1934 and 1937, is presented by me and the Kovozavody Prostejov manufacturer.
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With the first snow of a cold Russian winter in 1941/42, a new white camouflage was implemented on Luftwaffe planes. This white Bf 109F-2 from I/JG-54 is a typical example. Let’s take a look, how I managed to render this kind of camouflage in 1/72 scale.
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At the beginning of 1943, the Germans captured two Yaks-1b and immediately began using them for reconnaissance and diversionary actions. The Germans acquired another machine on May 11, 1943. It was White 2, the plane of the commander of the 148th IAP Cpt. Leonid Smirnov. The machine was almost immediately involved in actions against its former owners. I was so fascinated by the story of the Cpt. Smirnov’s machine, that I decided to build a scaled copy of it.
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František Novák, Josef Hubáček, and Petr Široký, three of our excellent aerial acrobats, first introduced themselves during an army airshow in the year 1936 on Prague-Kbely airfield. They were flying three specially camouflaged aircraft: Avia BA-122 OK-AVE, OK-VIM, and OK-VIL.
In the air, the group was always flying in such a formation, that the color scheme of their planes created the Czechoslovak flag, tricolor in order white-blue-red.
Fast and furious, these words could describe not only the result but the Macchi M.C.72 development process as well. This graceful aircraft was developed in 1931, directly for the Schneider Cup floatplane race. For a modeler interested in the Golden Age of Aviation, this is one of the essential types 😊.
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“And now for something completely different.” However, instead of Monty Python’s man with three buttocks, all I have to offer is a Warhammer miniature. This officially makes our modeling blog cross-genre 🙂
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Kaman UH-2A Seasprite is a rather conventional helicopter with a single main rotor and a tail rotor. It had been used by the US Navy since the 1960s as a rescue and multipurpose helicopter. Later versions were developed for anti-submarine purposes. In Vietnam, Seasprites were used in a combat environment. While piloting one of these machines in a rescue mission, Lt. Clyde E. Lassen earned the highest US military decoration, the Medal of Honor.
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Lt. Saburo Shindo in the cockpit of new delivered A6M2b Zero coded AI-102 from Akagi carrier took part in the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941. I have added another subject to my Pacific theatre scale model collection.
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