Long time readers may remember my Yakerschmitt, a totally fictional Me109 with an underslung turbojet, built for the sole purpose of confusing Luft46 fans. The trouble with creating fictional aircraft is that if you don’t do your research, you’re likely to recreate something that actually existed. These examples turned up as usual, after the project…

Eine Kleine Krautprojekt Celebrating a day off in the big smoke I wandered into Showcase Models to see what John had on the shelves. I came upon the AZ 1/72 Bucker 131 with conversion parts for the ‘Panzerbucker’. These consisted of four wing-mounted ‘Panzerfaust’ RPGs fired by a cable from the cockpit. About 150 such…

Krautprojekt 1/12 In response to the editor’s plea for copy the following will describe a model of one of the most extraordinary aircraft ever flown and an episode of suicidal courage on the part of its first and only pilot. In the autumn of 1944 things were looking bad for the Third Reich. Earlier that…

(Krautprojekt 2/11) History After a discussion with your editor we each decided to model ugly aircraft. He has a lot of silly French ones. The Ha 139 project arose because we each had a kit of the same aircraft at two different stages of its life – initially beautiful, then horribly defaced. Beginning in 1936…

Lifting the lid on a High Planes kit does not fill one with joy at this expression of the kit maker’s art, rather it creates a feeling of dread at having to make something coherent from the roughly hewn parts found in the box. The first impulse is to put the lid back on the…

For once this year I’ve found a modelling subject that meets all my preferred criteria. It’s an airliner in a simple grey and white color scheme. It’s a Revell kit so it is virtually challenge free. And it was flown by the Royal Australian Air Force so it fits in with my plan to focus…

No doubt you recall that I’m trying to get some models of RAAF aircraft made this year. Having made aircraft from the first and second series of A- registered aircraft I thought it would be a good thing to make an aircraft from the third series and, since I’d made the A2- SE5A from the…

Am I giving away my age if I say that I remember when the Royal Australian Air Force was flying CAC CA-27 Avon Sabres? Not that I actually remember seeing one flying. By the time I became interested in aircraft the RAAF was reequipping with Mirage IIIs and who would be interested in watching a…

One at the first things they teach you in school is that the number 2 follows on in the sequence that begins with 1, under some circumstances. And so it was with the Royal Australian Air Force when they began allocating numbers for their aircraft. Thus, since the first A- number allocated in the first…

As part of my project to make more RAAF aircraft this year I reached back into the mists of time to the air force’s first ‘A’ series of aircraft. All RAAF aircraft are registered beginning with ‘A’ followed by a number which represents a particular type of aircraft, followed by another number which represents each…

It’s still something of a mystery to me why I ended up making a model of a Bf109. Lots of modellers do it all the time, Bf109s must be in the top five modelling subjects of all time, but I don’t think I’ve made one since the 1970s. It may be a historically significant aircraft…