When I first came across the F-Rsin company they were a little business that made respectable full resin 1/144 kits of obscure airliners. These days they offer also a range of injection moulded airliner kits and some airliner decals. Their injection moulded kits look as though they have come from the Mach 2 moulding machine…

It started like this. I was out in my shed fondling some of the kits in my Treasure when I came across a box that caught my attention. It is not one of the world’s great masterpieces of box art but it shows a light aeroplane flying over a wartime scene, bearing the markings of…

The Douglas XA2D looks a lot like the earlier piston engined Douglas AD Skyraider and was supposed to be an attack fighter to fly off the US Navy’s escort carriers. These carriers were too small for the new generation of pure jet aircraft so a turboprop engine was ordered instead. It actually comprised two jet…

On the basis of a couple of rather unfortunate French bombers made during the interwar period all French aeroplanes made during that period have been dubbed ‘ugly’ by the great unwashed. What would then know? Not all French aeroplanes are Amiot 143s, Potez 540s or even Farman 220s. And even then they aren’t that bad…

(Please tell me I’m getting better at this.) The year 1995 seems like several centuries ago and it is, in one way. That year I finally managed to get my hands of the Hasegawa 1/72 kit of the Vought XF5U-1, probably lurking at the back of one of those old fashioned model shops that you…

In years long past I built the Monogram 1/72 Grumman F7F and F8F kits and loved them. They are not complex kits but they go together very neatly and look the part. The Monogram F8F kit was first released in 1970 and has since been re-released by Hasegawa and Revell. Since then Frog, Sword and…

We’re all allowed to have our biases and to be truthful about it: I never liked the look of the Gloster Javelin very much. It was a big fat aeroplane with big fat wings that looked about as capable of doing anything useful in a military sense as a loaf of bread. I was wrong,…

The MiG-19 (with the NATO reporting name ‘Farmer’) was the first Soviet designed and built supersonic fighter and the world’s first mass produced supersonic fighter. It was a development of the earlier MiG-17 powered by two jet engines and more streamlined to make use of the additional power. The prototype first flew in May 1952…

The experts are not quite sure why North American designed and built the Navion. Some think it may have been as a way of keeping together the team that had designed the Mustang by giving it something to do before designing North American’s new jet fighters. Others think that it might have been North American’s…

The period immediately after World War II saw development of a wide and amazing range of new aeroplane designs intended to make best use of the latest developments in aerodynamics and jet engines. One that captured the mood of those times was the Handley Page HP.80 which had its genesis in design studies for a…

Dewoitine seems to have liked monoplanes from the beginning but for the first decade he concentrated on parasols in which the wing is attached to the fuselage with struts rather than attached directly to the fuselage. There are a couple of advantages with parasol aircraft, they are more stable because the wing is higher and…

I first became aware of the Airbus A.220 while watching sessions of Big Jet TV. Most of you will not be aware of this televisual feast because you don’t think that jet airliners are among the most elegant things that humans ever invented and don’t feel the compulsion to watch them in action for hours…