The North American P-51 is one of the most written about aeroplanes in the history of aviation. Designed and constructed in 120 days to meet the desperate needs of the British government in April 1940 it was a good aeroplane which became great when powered by the famous Rolls Royce Merlin engine. It was the primary fighter in use by the USAAF by the end of World War II in Europe and the Pacific with outstanding range and performance. Other allied nations also flew it and in Australia the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation began constructing it from 1945. In appearance the major difference between the earlier P-51B and the later P-51D versions was the replacement of the rear decking with a bubble canopy, giving it a modern and highly efficient appearance.

A large number of P-51s were handed over to British forces where it was called the ‘Mustang’. The earlier versions were numbered Mustang Mk.I to Mustang Mk.III, the P-51D (and later P-51K) were called the Mustang Mk.IV in British service.
The Royal Australian Air Force’s 3 Squadron flew Mustangs with allied forces in Italy in 1944 and 1945. Deliveries of Mustang III’s (P-51B/C’s) and Mustang IV’s (P-51D/K’s) began in November 1944, replacing the Kittyhawks that the Squadron had flown previously. The squadron flew mainly ground attack missions as the Luftwaffe had largely disappeared in the region and used the Mustang’s exceptional range to fly as far as Yugoslavia on the other side of the Adriatic to support partisan operations there. 3 Squadron was operating its Mustangs from bases in Italy right up to the end of the war in Europe.

Academy are making some of the nicest little kits available these days, generally highly accurate, well detailed and very cheap. There are some faults (and the reviewers in the magazines will let you know if they are significant) with some of the kits in the range but overall they are not serious and at the price it hard to go past them in comparison to the more expensive Japanese kits. There are, however, so many P-51D models around that I wanted to make something that was a little bit different, not just another of the hoards of all-silver P-51Ds that crowded the skies over Europe at the end of the war. The solution to this little problem came with Aussie Decals set which provides decals for Mustang III’s and Mustang IVs flown by the RAAF’s 3 Squadron in Italy. With the good Academy kit and what looked like good decals it should have been an easy little job.

The kit is pretty accurate and there is no need to do anything serious. I could have opened up the outlets from the radiator that would have improved the look of the model, but I didn’t. The radiator inlet needs thinning down by carving away the excess plastic to make it look good. The kit offers the options of two slightly different shape canopies and the experten at the MOB assure me that the slightly humped one is the right one for a Mustang IV flown by 3 Squadron, The experten also assure me that these Mustangs also go without the little housing on wing leading edge for the inner machine gun. It is an easy matter to remove them and drill a hole for the machine guns. I was shown a plan for the Mustang with the inner housing missing but all of the photos I could find of Mustangs shows all three housings – and I couldn’t find any photos of 3 Squadron Mustangs with the right angle to be sure – but it was too late by the time I started to feel suspicious that somebody might be playing a hoax on me. The experten also assure me that 3 Squadron Mustangs didn’t have cuffs on the propeller while the kit does. Photos suggest that they might be right this time but taking them off the prop supplied in the kit would have been difficult so I peered into the spares box and discovered the prop of on old (we’re talking 1950s here) Airfix Mustang that looks as though it was salvaged from one of the first kits I ever made. I decided to use it instead (partly for its nostalgia value) but after an hour or so’s filing I was starting to wonder if it was a good idea. It still looks a bit chunky in comparison to more modern mouldings, but there it is.

The colours are standard RAF fighter camouflage from the late war period as supplied by Aeromaster, with the exception that I don’t like the extreme greeness of their ‘Sky’ so I consulted my colour references and found something a little less green, FS 34424 from Modelmaster. The reference for the decals gives Humbrol G47 for the rudder which looks a bit too light to me, but I can’t argue since I didn’t have a better reference. The colour drawing with the decals (shown here) doesn’t show the starboard view, neither did any of the photos I had easily to hand, so I guessed.

The decals are excellent, sufficient for a Mustang III and two Mustang IV’s. They only supply markings for the fuselage, you have to rummage around in your collection of spares to find the roundels for the wings. The decals also proved to be very fragile so I had to coat them with a clear varnish before getting them onto the model properly. I didn’t test them in advance and one of the serial numbers just disintegrated, so I had to use a serial that isn’t correct for the larger squadron codes. There’s a message there somewhere – actually there are a lot of lessons I learned with this model.

(June 2000)

Dewoitine is one of the best known names in French aviation, mainly because of the Dewoitine D.520 fighter, the ‘French Spitfire’, that served with distinction in the short Battle of France in mid 1940. Emile Dewoitine began constructing aeroplanes in 1923 and produced several good designs in the 1920s. Work began on the D.37 series around 1930 and the parasol wing prototype first flew in 1934. Twenty-eight D.371s were ordered by the Armée de l’Air in 1935 and 14 D.372s (export version of the D.371) were ordered for the Lithuanian Air Force. Later a total of 44 D.373s and D.376s were delivered (the latter version had folding wings and two squadrons were in service with the Aéronautique Navale in 1940). At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War the 14 Lithuanian D.372s and 10 French D.371s went to Spain where they served successfully with Republican forces until more advanced aeroplanes joined the Nationalist forces and they were replaced by Russian Polikarpov fighters.

Where would we be without Azur? In the past couple of years they have produced a series of excellent limited-run kits of French aeroplanes. Each one has been excellent value with finely crafted parts, a small fret of brass parts, a vacformed windscreen and an excellent decal sheet. Long may the continue producing kits like this successfully.
The D.371 is a petite model with very fragile parts. It is a typical limited run kit which asked the modeller to make their contribution in completing a good end result, unlike some of the latest injection moulded kits that almost make themselves. Construction is actually very straight forward and falls into three parts.

First is the engine which comprises a beautifully detailed crankcase, individual cylinders and a delightful engine cowling, all very well detailed in resin. The instruction sheet tells you to make a large number of individual exhaust pipes to be attached to the rear of the engine, it’s not as difficult as it looks but they aren’t entirely necessary to a nice looking little model. When you’ve finished constructing the engine in its cowling put it aside, joining it to the fuselage is the last step in the project.

Next comes the fuselage which is very standard with a nicely detailed little cockpit. You need to make your own tail struts as they don’t come with the kit, the instructions tell you how.

The wings are very simple, a one piece wing that needs a touch of cleaning up and the machine guns. This can be a little confusing since the instructions tell you that for the D.371 you have to add stretched sprue to the wings for the guns or use the supplied guns for the D.372. My research suggests that it is probably the other way around – the box shows a D.371 with machine guns as supplied in the kit which clinched the matter for me.

With the engine, fuselage and wings ready you come to the most daunting part of the project, putting them together. The struts supplied with the kit are extremely thin and fragile and it took me a long while to work up the courage to tackle them. The key to success in using the struts successfully is to use a solid, precise jig that holds the wing and fuselage exactly where they need to be and then fitting the struts into place using drops of liquid glue. I found it easiest to do this with the model upside down with the wing facing up and the fuselage perched above it, starting with the inner struts and working out. Work with a pair of fine tweezers and a great deal of patience, when everything is done go away and shake for a while. A day later I continued and put the undercarriage on, once again using little dobs of liquid glue. Liquid glue is preferable to SuperGlue because it gives you time to move the struts into exactly the right place and welds the parts together – making me feel a bit more confident about the strength of butt joins than I would with super glue which has little shear strength. When you come back a couple of days later and take the model out of its jig the end result is a lot stronger than you’d expected. That doesn’t stop the individual struts from breaking and a couple did as I completed the model, but the other struts held and another little DOB of liquid glue took care of the problem.

The kit offers options to make either a D.371 or a D.372 with alternate tail planes, spatted or unpathed wheels and the option of machine guns. The kit also offers five colour options, one French, two Spanish and two Lithuanian. The simplest would be an all-silver Lithuanian version and the most complex one of the Spanish versions. I wouldn’t want to tackle the Spanish one with the wing attached to the fuselage, perhaps others are bolder than me. The French version is fairly simple to complete and that’s what I chose (what else?). The top colour green is best represented by Humbrol 80 (so I’m told by people who should know – the French Aviation Modelling web site) and I used Humbrol 11 silver for the rest. I only found out that the decals for the rudder stripes were too big for the rudder on the model when it was too late, and rudder stripes really can’t be swapped around because that’s where the French put the aircraft numbers.
Would I recommend this kit? You bet! But its not for the faint hearted or the inexperienced and getting this model finished successfully was quite a challenge. But what a lovely little aeroplane and what a lovely little kit!

(May 2000)

Having almost run out of Boeing airliners to model I decided it was time to make some Douglas airliners. Having been thoroughly annoyed by the quality of the Minicraft Boeing 707 kits I’d had to use I was delighted at the quality of the Minicraft DC-4 kits which may not be totally accurate but look like DC-4s and have a nice delicate quality about them.

I don’t think of the DC-4 a very attractive airliner but found that I had two Minicraft DC-4 kits in my collection so I thought I might do something interesting with them and make them to demonstrate a couple of slices of Australian aviation history

Australian National Airways imported four DC-4s into Australia, beginning in 1946. They revolutionized local air transport in the same way that DC-2s and DC-3s had before the war. Hawkeye make a lovely sheet of decals of those first ANA DC-4s so the choice was obvious. It would also have been obvious to make VH-ANA which was the first DC-4 to fly in Australia but more interesting, I thought, to make VH-ANC. In October 1946 it was the first airliner to make a scheduled service flight linking Australia and North America, flying a wet lease for British Commonwealth Pacific Airlines which did not have any aircraft at the time.

At the other end of the time line is two DC-4s that Qantas was flying in the 1970s. The only other DC-4s still flying in Australia were a couple that had been converted to Carvairs (for which Roden make a nice kit and Hawkeye make excellent Ansett-ANA decals). Qantas was not keen on flying these DC-4s but they were used on the route linking Norfolk Island with the rest of Australia. The reason for this was the ‘90 minute rule’ that said a two engined airliner had to be at all times within 90 minutes flying time of a runway it could use, and there was no two engined airliner capable of making the flight to Norfolk Island in 90 minutes. As a result a four engined airliner had to be used and other factors meant that the only thing that filled the bill was old DC-4s.

Qantas was given two DC-4s and told the fly the route, which it did for a number of years until a dispensation against the rule was finally granted and East-West Fokker F-27s took over the route.

(November 2017)

Back in the mists of time – probably the early 1960s – I received a book about aeroplanes and a picture in it that captured my imagination was of a formation of Blue Angels F11Fs. The aeroplane itself looked the epitome of streamlining and speed with no compromises. This may well have been the beginning of my love affair with jets designed in the 1960s and 1970s when aeronautical engineers were still struggling to find the way to design the truly successful high performance fighter and trying all kinds of experiments to find what worked best. Out of this era the F11F is probably one of the simplest and straight forward designs combining a wasp-waisted fuselage designed around a big, powerful engine and gracefully swept back wings. Later on I read that the F11F was the first US Navy aircraft capable of supersonic level flight and that its afterburner was the reason it flew with the Blue Angles – selected for the noise it generated more than anything else.

Hasegawa must have released its kit of the F11F in the late 1970s or early 1980s. My pleasure at seeing the kit and the haste with which I constructed it resulted in something less than pleasing. One of the main problems was the undercarriage which I did not get right so the aeroplane sat with one wing decidedly higher than the other – a problem with many models with undercarriage close to the aeroplane’s centreline. I always planned to make a better model of a F11F one of these days and collected a couple of kits when the opportunity arose, one of a standard operational version and another of a Blue Angles version. Along the way I also picked up a bottle of ‘Blue Angels’ blue; all I needed was the inclination to get on with it.

Unlike some of the limited run kit manufacturers, Hasegawa has been making excellent kits for as long as most of us can remember. Also unlike most limited run kits, Hawegawa use a nice high quality, sturdy and hard plastic that is a pleasure to work with. Everything fits together like a dream and the detail on most of the parts is ideal. The instruction sheet tells you what to leave out and the couple of changes that make the Blue Angels version. I later figured out that it might have been good to run a bit of fuse wire along the rear port fuselage for the pipe that carried the oil for the smoke into the jet stream. Painting is simplicity itself, all over Blue Angels blue. It seems that the US Navy liked to keep things simple so that the interiors like the undercarriage bays were the same colour as the rest of the airframe although I did find some photos of a restored Blue Angels F11F that had part of the interior painted white. I decided not to complicate things and pretend I hadn’t seen that photo.

After that there are some polished aluminium parts like leading edges and walk ways and it’s time for the decals. I guess that the decals would be the same age as the rest of the kit, 25 or so years old but they had not aged as well. I applied a couple of coats of Microscale Liquid Decal film to hold them together but even so getting the decals off the back paper and onto the model was hard work and I had to go back and respray some of the yellow areas that had not come out looking very good. Despite the problems with the decals the end result looks pretty flash – just as a F11F is supposed to look. I’ve got some decals for a squadron aeroplane and a spare Hasegawa kit, so it’s only a matter of time until this model has a partner.

(February 2008)

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 they give greater visibility with the wing located at about pilot eye level so they do not block the pilot’s vision upwards and down. However, by the mid 1930s they had largely fallen out of favour.

Before I write about the Dewoitine 37 series of fighters a word or two about the designation of French aircraft before World War II, whether you want to know about it or not. You will find that most French aircraft from this period have a three number designation, the first two numbers are the model number and the third is the variant number. So, in the case of the Dewoitine 37 series the 370 was the prototype, the 371 and 372 were the first and second versions produced for ground based operations, the 373 was then manufactured for naval use, the 374 and 375 were planned versions that were not proceeded with and the 376 was a second version produced for the navy.

The fact that the prime French fighter of World War II was the Dewoitine 520 tells you that it was also the first variant of the design and, although there were more variants planned, from the 521 to the 525, none got very far. On the other hand, the French reconnaissance aeroplane designated the Potez 63.11 received that designation because the design had started out as a multi-role fighter (like a less ferocious Bf110) that was produced in so many versions that the reconnaissance version was the eleventh.

Back to the Dewoitine 37, which was not a very successful fighter. Having spent the 1920s designing and making, or selling under licence, a range of parasol fighters of limited success, of which the most successful was the Dewoitine 27 series, the company entered the 1930s with its most advanced parasol fighter yet, the 37 series. It was more streamlined and had a more powerful radial engine and looked much more business-like than the company’s previous designs. However, after the prototype made its first flight on 1 August 1931 a number of defects were found that needed rectification and that took time. As a result the first production model, the 371, did not make its first flight until September 1934. The French Air Ministry ordered 28 of this variant in April 1935 and the order had been completed by December that year. After an accident with the prototype a structural weakness was discovered in the wings so they were returned to the factory and did not emerge until 1937, by which time the 371 was obsolete.

Lithuania ordered 14 Dewoitine 372s that were differently armed. By the time they were ready the Lithuanians has cancelled that order in favour of the more advanced Dewoitine 501s. The French Aeronautique Navale ordered twenty Dewoitine 373s that were similar to the 371 but equipped with an arrester hook, flotation gear and a wing reduced by 30cm in span so they would fit onto the lifts of the French aircraft carrier. The French navy ordered a further 25 as the Dewoitine 376 which were equipped with folding wings, although it took an hour to get the wings ready for flight.

Being well outclassed by more modern fighters 21 Dewoitine 371 were sent to the French colony in Tunisia where they served until they were replaced by Morane Saulnier 406s in 1939. One way and another the remaining 371s and 372s ended up flying in the Spanish Republican air force where they did well against the Nationalist Heinkel He51s and Fiat CR32s but were outclassed by more modern fighters and eventually replaced by Soviet Polikarpov fighters. The last ones were destroyed on the ground in an Italian bombing attack in February 1939. At the beginning of World War II the navy’s Dewoitines were allocated to squadrons to protect the ports of Toulon and Calais but they did not see action against Luftwaffe. After the Armistice they were used for limited training but withdrawn from service in April 1940.

The Azur 1/72 kit

Using the Azur kits you can make all the versions of the Dewoitine 37 series. The kit of the naval versions, released in 1997, contains options for the 373 and 376 and the kit of the ground based version, released in 1998, contains options for the 371 and 372. They use the same basic kit parts but the naval version contains a new resin wing and arrester hook as well at two versions of engine cowling. Strangely the resin wing in the naval kits has a greater span than the injection moulded one, which seems strange since the naval version had the shorter wing span. The resin wings for the 373/376 is better moulded and has flaps, which the 371/72 doesn’t.

I made the model of the Dewoitine 371 twenty years before making the model of the 376 and some of the smaller struts of the 371 seem to have disappeared during the intervening period. Apart from that, the only real visual differences between them is that the Humbrol 11 silver finish was a lot brighter then than it is now and the recommended upper colours for the 371, Humbrol 80, is not a colour that I would probably use now. The cockpit interiors are adequate and probably as detailed as they need to be for what is visible, though my 371 cockpit has seatbelts because they came with the kit whereas the 376 doesn’t. The reason for this is because I could not find any photo etched parts in my 376 kit until I found them hiding behind the decal sheet, by which time it was too late to use them.

Both kits offer the engine in resin with a central crankcase and lots of tiny engine cylinders that have to be carefully glued to the crankcase. This might make sense if the engine wasn’t hidden behind a large spinner so all the effort is pretty much wasted and I would have preferred instead a single well mounded resin part. The kit instructions also suggests scratch building exhaust pipes from each tiny cylinder head, which I laughingly dismissed as being an even greater waste of time since they wouldn’t be seen underneath the engine cowling. Perhaps I could have super detailed the engine and left the cowling off, but I could just as easily have committed myself to the local mental asylum.

The most challenging part of building these kits was attaching the wings to the fuselage using the small and fragile struts provided in the kit. There are no locating holes or tabs to do this though the plastic moulded wing has much better indications of where the struts join the wing than the resin one does. Another advantage of the plastic wing over the resin one is that you can use the standard plastic melting glue to attach the wings to the struts of the 371, giving a stronger bond, whereas there is no option but superglue in attaching the 376 plastic struts to the resin wing, risking a catastrophic failure sometime in the future.

I don’t recall now how I managed to align the fuselage and wings of the 371 to join them with the struts, all my notes say is ‘a solid, precise jig’. That must have been a work of art in itself. Since then my standards have slipped and I use large blobs of Blue Tack to hold everything in place which makes it easier to make the small adjustments required to make sure everything is square before test fitting the struts to get everything micro-millimeter perfect. It was easier to start with the inner struts and then let the main struts go there they wanted to go since, this time, there was no precise indication of where they should go. Then a few dots of superglue, wait a while and then the challenge is to remove the model from the Blue Tack without breaking anything. In theory I should have used the same process to attach the undercarriage to the model but it proved too difficult so I just had to trust that the kit maker had got the lengths of the struts just right, glue the parts together and hope for the best. At least, using Revell Contacta glue gives a little time and flexibility to line everything up properly before leaving them to set.

After that the rest of the model more of less makes itself. The arrester hook for the 373/376 is moulded in resin and looked to be impossible to remove from its casting block without breaking. I was right and something similar had to be made using bits and pieces from my spares box. Of all the ways that I make models the one that has changed the most over the past twenty years has been my painting. The 371 model is painted in Humbrol enamel paints, Numbers 11 and 80, but these days I use almost exclusively lacquers and fortunately there are some very good metallic finishes in lacquers. The fuselage of the 376 was airbrushed in Tamiya LP-38 Flat Aluminium and the cowling in Tamiya TS-83 Metallic Silver to give a bit of tonal variety. I was tempted to do a little bit of subtle weathering with dustings of slightly altered shades but fear of separating the wing and fuselage persuaded me otherwise.

These Dewotine 37 series fighters might have been a failure in real life but models of them look very nice, in that particular French inter-war fashion. The only reason for not making them is the stress of getting the wings and fuselages together without laying in a large supply of bravery and beta-blockers.

(July 2020)

This month we begin with a feast of four Airbus A.320s. All the Revell 1/144 kit and made with the CFM 56 engines. There’s already been plenty of these and these have been made in the same way as those previous ones.

First an Air Inter A.320 finished using 8A decals. This is the final Air Inter scheme before that airline was acquired by Air France.

Next two Ansett Australia A.320s with the final scheme, provided by Hawkeye with the wing decals by 8A. Since making these I’ve been told by somebody who knows that this batch of A.320s was delivered to Ansett with grey wings rather then the white wings of the earlier batch. Unfortunately, all the photos I looked at did not tell me of this development and Graeme didn’t tell me until it was too late. This is how VH-HYA would have appeared in 2002 it if had had white wings.

I’m not a great fan of one off schemes but could not resist this MASP decal sheet for VH-HYN which flew the Olympic Torch around our wide brown land in the months before the Sydey Olympic Games in 2000. Again, it should have grey rather than white wings but I won’t tell if you don’t. The decals are a combination of MASP, Hawkeye and 8A.

Finally an A.320 in the livery of Strategic Airlines. The decal sheet is from Decales Global and intended for a Luxembourg airline of the same name and livery. I’ve managed most of the amendments that appear on the Australian registered aircraft, VH-YQA is it appeared in 2011, but could not make the little Australian flags that appear on the wing end plates so you will have to imagine them.

This Dewoitine 376 was made from the Azur 1/72 kit. It is a fairly easy kit to make apart from mounting the parasol wing on the fuselage. It is painted overall in Tamiya LP-38 Flat Aluminium and the cowling in Tamiya TS-83 Metallic Silver to give a bit of tonal variety. It represents No 31 in service with AC 1 at Lanveoc Poulmic in 1939.

This BS Design 1/144 Schleicher ASW 28 glider is one of the smallest (if not the smallest) model I’ve ever made. It has only four parts but is not easy to put together because it is so tiny and the parts fit is not great. I added another two parts, the undercarriage doors to give it a slightly greater sense of authenticity. The decals that come with this kit are for the prototype which first flew in 2000.

And here’s one I made earlier, the Condor 1/72 kit of the German A-4 ballistic missile also known as the V-2.

(July 2020)