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…

I suppose you’d call it at New Years Resolution but I didn’t think of it that way at the time. I looked at two of the Special Displays in The Little Aviation Museum, the one containing US Navy and Marine Corps aircraft – which has 72 aircraft – and the Special Display of RAAF aircraft…

This model came out of two things I wanted to do this year. One was to participate in the Model Geeks Podcast group build, this time on the theme of ‘MiG Killers’. The other thing was to write this monthly contribution only about Australian aircraft. (This means either an aircraft registered in the RAAF’s A-…

As you will no doubt recall, the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation (CAC) was the brain-child of Essington Lewis, the Managing Director of BHP. During a visit to Europe in 1935 he came to believe that another major war was inevitable. He believed that Australia needed its own aircraft manufacturing capability so, on his return to Australia,…

If you are interested in early World War II aviation you will have come across the Lockheed Hudson. It is a strange looking aircraft, clearly an airliner that has been hacked about to turn it into something a bit more military. Those Hudsons with the huge turret on the back look particularly ungainly, but I…

In the early 70s the widespread deployment of helicopters mounting anti-armour missiles was of great concern to the US Army. The US had deployed these weapons successfully during the 1972 Easter offensive in Vietnam. This had highlighted that the current US anti-aircraft weapons were inadequate to deal with this threat. The Soviets also had this…

The trouble began when the latest envelope of decals arrived from Peter at Hawkeye. As well as the decals I had ordered he included his latest creations, decals for the AirAustralia and QantasLink A.320s. The decals are excellent and a worthy investment for anyone interested in Australian aviation and airliners in particular. They are clearly,…