From the inside I’ve had enough of Boeing 737s in this past year, but from the outside they come in such a variety of shapes, sizes and plumages that it would be hard not to find them interesting. From a leftover thought from Boeing 707s and 727s they’ve become the most popular and numerous airliner…

Many, many years ago I made the old Hasegawa F-100D that was marketed in the shops I went to as a Frog kit. Even then I was showing my Frankish interests and made it up in the markings of the Armee de l’Air. However, over the decades the kit started to show its age, the…

This aeroplane was one of those that gave thee Armee de l’Air the bad reputation it had at the end of the Battle of France. It had been designed in the early 1930s as a multi-role aeroplane to fill reconnaissance and bombing roles and went on to equip seven reconnaissance groups at the beginning of…

I’m amazed to realize that after only a few months I’m almost half way through my project to make 22 Lightning models (although the plan has now puffed out to 23 or perhaps 24). I’m now starting to get the hang of how to overcome or ignore all the little problems with this Trumpeter kit…

The Canadians must have a thing for noses. When you go to the Canadian Aviation Museum just outside Ottawa you will find all kinds of interesting thing including the only surviving parts of two of the country’s most intriguing aeroplanes, a CF-105 nose mounted on a wall and a C-102 nose sitting quietly on the…

The battle between bombers and fighters defending their territory during World War II and in the early days of the Cold War led to rapid technological developments. During the war both sides had learned to their great cost that bombers could not fight off attacking fighters with guns (though they often discouraged attacks being presses…

For some reason that evades me and many other people the Australian Government has decided that the RAAF is going to be equipped with the Lockheed Martin F-35 when it finally enters service. If the government were to ask me – which seems unlikely – I’d tell them that the F-35 has been designed by…

By the 1970s the French AMX-30 Main Battle Tank was becoming obsolete and in 1977 the French Army drafted requirements for a new Engine Principal de Combat to replace it. New tanks like the M1 Abrams, Leopard 2 and Merkava were studied to see if they could fill the role but were rejected. Then a…

You know that conceptual game; which one would win if Godzilla fought Mothra or a shark fought a polar bear? Not so conceptual in 1940 was the question of what would happen if a French Hotchkiss H35 fought a German PzKpfw III, The last time I made a model of a German tank was back…

  I’d read that this kit was due for release so I was delighted to wander into Hearns Hobbies one day and find one on the shelves. What did not please me was the price, near enough to that of a kit twice or three times the size. But since I wanted to make a…

At last Hobby Boss has got around to releasing models of French fighters in their range of cheap, quick to make kits. There’s a limit to how many Bf109s and Spitfires you can make, after all, so it’s about time they did the Dewoitine 520 and Morane Saulnier 406 fighters. I can’t wait for their…

The B-52 is probably one of the most important and impressive aeroplanes ever made and it will probably remain in service for near enough to a century after its first flights. Its roots lie in the beginnings of the Cold War in 1948 when plans for the next generation of heavy bombers to replace the…