In 1940 the standard equipment of the French Air Force proved to be inferior to the fighters employed by other countries such as Germany and Britain. As a result the French were forced to purchase Curtiss Hawk 75As as a stopgap until their next generation of fighters were ready for large scale service and by…

Japan’s rapid expansion into the Pacific during the early stages of the Pacific War led to the need for a fighter that could give close air support to amphibious landings in places where Japanese forces didn’t have any landing strips. Mitsubishi put floats on their Zero fighter but Kawanishi was asked to design a new…

Here’s an aeroplane that I knew almost nothing about and which you may not have know existed, until now. I’m one of those people who usually makes models because the subject looks interesting or because they fit into one of my current hobby-horses which is, of course, French aviation. So when Azmodels released kits of…

The Nieuport 28 was the final stage in the development of Nieuport fighters that had begun with the Nieuport 11 in the early days of World War I. All Nieuport fighters prior to the 28 were sesquiplanes in which the bottom wing had a single spar while the upper wing had two spars so the…

The Nieuport 11 was one of the best of the first generation of fighters. It was derived from a racing aeroplane developed before the war and had such potential that it was ordered by both the French and British governments. It entered service in August 1915 and its high speed, excellent manoeuverability and high climbing…

The Vought A-7 looks as though somebody did something terrible to a Vought F-8 Crusader. It is basically the same shape but the miscreant squashed the poor F-8 and then attacked it with a bicycle pump. No wonder it got the nickname ‘Short Little Ugly Fucker’. Of course, that was the point of the A-7,…

From what I’ve heard on old blues records it appears that when people wake up in the morning they feel the need to dust their brooms. I’m not really sure what kind of dusting that means but anyway that’s not how I woke up the other day. When I woke up there was a simple,…

Earlier this year I completed 1/144 scale models of some Fokker jet airliners, F-28s and Revell kits of the Fokker 100. At the end of that item I mentioned the shorter version of the Fokker 100, the Fokker 70, and that Alliance Airlines seemed to be the only airline in Australia flying it. I then…

Due to the way kits accumulate when you’re not watching them (the same way that wire coat hangers accumulate in your wardrobe) I ended up with three kits of the ancient Airfix 1/144 Airbus A.300B-2. These were not new kits. The first was the original 1974 boxing with Air France decals, another was the 1974…

After the success of the Fokker F-27 Friendship, the Fokker company next developed the F-28 Fellowship, a medium jet airliner that gave greater speed and range than the F-27 but was still smaller and cheaper than other jet airliners of the time such as the Douglas DC-9 and BAC 1-11. F-28s did very well in…