Those of us of a certain age (and beyond) may remember seeing the big old Armstrong Whitworth Argosies sitting on the tarmac at Essendon Airport. They were purpose designed freighters with a pod fuselage based on the idea that if you could open them at both ends it would be quicker and easier to unload…

This model represents a DC-5 flying with Australian National Airways in 1944 made from a F-Rsin 1/144 kit with home made decals The DC-5 was a rare aeroplane, it might have been very successful and had been ordered by KLM and British Airways. However, the war intervened and only 12 had been completed before production…

Welsh Models has been around for decades, initially offering kits of airliners in 1/144. These kits were fairly primitive vacform kits with everything for the model on the sheet of vacformed plastic, including tiny details such as the propellor blades. Understandably, these kits were quite difficult to make well. More recently Welsh Models have been…

A bit like the aeroplanes that this Matchbox kit depicted, the night fighter Meteors were made towards the end of the line. The night fighters lost a lot of the good looks of the earlier Meteors by having a big radar set in the nose, which made them look just a little bit ridiculous. Each…

A few months back I found myself in the centre of Melbourne with a few minutes to kill so I popped into Hearn’s Hobbies to have a look at their wall of paint. After having selected a few items to take home I went around to the other side where the aeroplanes are stacked on…

I had steered clear of the Airfix Buccaneer S.2 kit for many years because I recalled the ancient Blackburn NA.39 kit that I had been given as a present – which means it was before 1965 – which had all the faults of those early Airfix kits. It also had a folding nose and other…

In the early 1930s European countries with overseas possessions, such as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and France, began setting up air routes to their colonies and other places where they had influence. The French had three main air routes; to Saigon in south east Asia, to possessions in Africa and through them across the…

From 1943 the United States Navy became interested in the development of jet engine powered fighters. However application of the new engine to naval use presented problems that did not impede development of land based jet powered aeroplanes. The three most serious problems the new engine presented were a long take-off run, a high landing…

During the early 1930s the multi-place twin-engined long range fighter concept became popular and the first of them was the Potez 63 series, developed in response to a French air ministry requirement of 1934. The prototype first flew on 25 April 1936 but it was damaged in a crash landing and the second prototype, a…

Design of the Loire 130 commenced in 1933 to meet the French navy’s requirement for an all-purpose shipboard catapult-launched three seater seaplane. The prototype flew for the first time in November 1934 and competed with five other contestants for the contract, eventually winning in August 1936. Two versions were ordered, the 130M (Metropole) and the…

The deHavilland Company used a deHavilland Vampire fitted with a Ghost engine to set a new world air speed record in May 1947. Previously the British government had not been very interested in an up-rated Vampire fighter but the new record got their attention, work started on developing the Venom as a ground attack fighter…

The Heinkel He178 was the world’s first jet powered aeroplane. It was specially designed and built as a testbed for the revolutionary gas jet turbine engine that the Heinkel company had been developing for the previous three years. The principle of the gas jet had been known for centuries but it was only in the…