Scale aircraft modeling blog
The Mitsubishi A5M2b was a Japanese carrier-based fighter aircraft. It was the world’s first low-wing monoplane shipborne fighter to enter service and the predecessor to the famous Mitsubishi A6M “Zero”. The Allied code name was Claude.
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I have nostalgic memories of F-4F from aviation days I visited as a youngster, with a lot of jet planes including awesome, weathered Luftwaffe Phantoms.
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Little Aero A-18 called “Špaček” (Starling) was the first serial production fighter plane of Aero, a small new factory back then. One of the conditions set by MNO (Ministry of National Defence) was to use WW1 engines BMW IIIa with an output of 136 kW. It is not a lot of power, but A-18 was a small and light aircraft. Despite the small engine output, A-18 was capable of reaching a speed of 229 km/h and was capable of climbing up to 8000 meters.
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Potez 25 was a French single-engined, twin-seated biplane with a fixed landing gear. It was a simple construction, praised for its reliability and easy maintenance. Between 1925 and 1934, almost 4000 were built for the French air force. Another 2500 were built for export, for example to Indochina, Poland, Romania, Greece, Brazil, Japan, or Estonia.
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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.