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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.