Three Airliners in Three decades
Farman 60 – Junkers Ju90 – Short Sandringham

This is not as easy as I thought it would be; pick three models, write a little about them and drop in a picture. What could be easier? Not so, I’ve discovered.

The trouble is that even though there is now only about ten to twelve per cent of the planned exhibits on show in the museum there’s too much choice. I found myself wandering around in the galleries – in a digital sort of way – being attracted to this aircraft and then that one. As a result I got dreadfully confused.

Eventually I came to my senses and realized that I had to have a plan. Perhaps a major category to begin with. For me it’s simple, there are a lot of airliners in the museum’s collection so I started there. Then, to add a degree of difficulty, I decided that each of the three had to be from a different country. To make things even more difficult, I thought about three airliners from three different decades. Thus, the theme this week is three airliners, each from a different country in a different decade. Let’s see what I found.

First is the French Farman 60 Goliath which flew for many European airlines in the 1920s. It began life as a big bomber that was too late for World War I, as many of the first airliners did, but its size meant it was easy to convert into one of the first generation airliners. Flying in one would have been ‘interesting’.

This is as vacformed kit with white metal engines and wheels, one of several such kits of obscure inter-war airliners made in 1/144 by VLE Models. The last time I looked I found that the man behind VLE had died so this might not be an easy kit to find these days. I have a couple of Farman 60s in the larger 1/72 scale and one of these days I may get around to making one of them.

From the 1930s we have the German Junkers Ju90 which was the result of a failed strategic bomber project. For its time it was a big and purposeful looking airlines that had a large passenger capacity and long range. Only a handful were made, they entered service on the eve of World War II and most of them ended up in military service.

This is another vacform kit, this time produced by Air Craft Models, probably in the 1990s. Air Craft Models kits are some of the best airliner kits you can find, very nicely formed and with white metal parts for things like the propellers and wheels. I once saw one of these kits sell for almost $200 on ebay but you can still pick them up for only a fraction of that if you are lucky. My only disappointment with this kit is that my skills as a modeller were not up to doing it the justice it deserved.

From the 1940s here is the British Short Sandringham flying boat. They began as airliner conversions of the famous Short Sunderland flying boat and the version of any Sandringham depends on the mark of Sunderland it was converted from. A handful of these were still flying in the early 1970s on tourist routes.

This is a solid resin kit produced by F-Rsin which is, I undersand, a combined French and British enterprise. In comparison to the vacform kits I just mentioned, this is very simple and easy to put together. I recently bought a second of these kits and some Hawkeye Qantas Empire Airways decals for it, so there’s another job on my ever growing list of ‘to be done’ kits.