upnorth

Unless I missed seeing it, the Mirage F.1 hasn't been mentioned: First flight in 1966 and still in some limited active military service as well as with civilian contractors. The Let l-29 trainer also qualifies: First flight in 1959. It's mostly in the warbird category these days, but I think a few still soldier on in military service in Angola and Georgia.

It's definitely the Letov Š-328v, as mentioned above. The aircraft was from the early 1930s and was pretty much gone by the mid 1940s. The kit your models comes from was most certainly the KP kit that originated in 1972: https://www.scalemates.com/kits/kp-5-letov-s328--100951

One that comes to my mind was the Polish air force Tu-154 that went down in Smolensk, Russia in 2010. The Polish president, some high ranking government officials and pretty much the entire top brass of the Polish military were aboard and all perished in the crash. There were many factors at play, not the least of which was a degree of pilot overwork and some ensuing errors. It seems the pilot was the only member of the crew who could speak Russian, so he was communicating with the tower while making the approach. I think standard practice would have been to have one of the other crew talk to the tower so the pilot could concentrate on approach. The Polish president at the time, Lech Kachinski, had a reputation of being quite unforgiving of deviations from a planned travel route regardless of the reason. That has led to some speculation that it was fear of punishment that kept the crew from diverting to a different airport. I'm not sure how avoidable the crash specifically was, the Polish aviation authorities found some problems with the Russian investigation report, but the loss of that many high ranking officials was most certainly avoidable if they had been divided between two separate planes. There's not to much informaton out there about it that isn't heavily biased or conspiracy theory based. However, I did find this pair of videos that aren't too bad for that sort of thing:

On the Sunday, my girlfriend and I went to visit the chateau at Vranov. (Near the border with Austria):

🤣

I've been in a similar bracket the last couple of years in that I may be outgrowing drinking. For the last couple of years, alcohol of any kind has done nothing for me except mess with my sleep patterns. There's no more pleasant "buzz" from a couple of pints or shots anymore, so there doesn't seem much point in drinking anymore. There are a few respectable non-alcoholic beers available where I am, so I can still get the taste of beer when I want it and bypass the alcohol. I still go for beers with friends and nobody makes issue of my switch to non-alcoholic stuff. I've been without a drink of alcohol since the start of 2024 and my goal is to make it to my birthday, in August, or the wine festival season in September/October without alcohol. If I can do that, I might reward myself with a glass of local wine. My girlfriend's uncle makes wine and usually has a small family gathering at his cellar in Autumn to have a a tasting of his new product. I'll probably take part in that, as I usually do. In short, I'm confident I've hit a point where beer and spirits are a done thing for me and wine will be a small treat now and then.

It looks like we're saying goodbye to a screen legend, as Lou Gossett Jr. has left us. https://apnews.com/article/louis-gossett-jr-dies-1e86e1441ec8b614a282f3de22490a07 I remember him most as Fiddler from the "Roots" miniseries, Gunnery Sergeant Foley from "An Officer and a Gentleman" and as Jareeba in "Enemy Mine". I can't be sad, 87 years old is good innings and he gave us a lot of good characters over a long career. Thank you for the entertainment, sir.

I thought blasphemy these days was saying the F-35 is a beauty. 😈 Having said that, the F-35 has grown on me over time. The A model particularly.

The F-5 is one of my favorite American post WWII fighter designs. For me it's just the right balance of aesthetics to purposefulness along with a minimalist appeal. The T-38 was a nice looker too. However, the F-20 had a bit too much of that "Once too often to the same well" look about it to me.

It reminds me of when I had a customer care job for a couple of years. 90 percent or more of the service requests were from users who just never bothered to read our knowledgebase articles that we had a highly visible link to on our homepage and also included a link to in our "Welcome" email for every new user of our product, even the ones using at the free level. More than a couple of times we had people contacting us for refunds. We often couldn't find anyone with their names in our system and so we asked them to email us the receipt for what they wanted the refund for. More than a few times, the receipt would have one of our competitiors' logos on it. Granted, our company name and those of our competitiors all started with the same letter, but our logos were all very different. Never mind reading the instructions, some folks won't even bother looking at a logo on letterhead to make sure they're going off on the right person before they go off. 😡 I sincerely hope your dilema will have a positive resolution.

I imagine it's just a formality to open bidding to give the appearance of competition. I'll be surprized if it's anything other than the AW139

Great pictures! I was thinking of going to that show, but wasn't able to in the end. I really miss the show we used to have here in Brno.

It's sad, but it was coming. The Dutch shut down their F-16 demo a few years ago. I hope they'll find something to replace it with, though I don't forsee any flashy painted F-35s in the near future. I think it's doubly sad as the Belgians also stopped their Agusta 109 demo due to the retirement of the type. It was always a great demo to watch.

I just took a look at one in a shop yesterday. I can see where they used the Amodel kit as a pattern for it. Though they've given the new kit much more refined main landing gear. Unfortunately, my concerns about the nose contours that I voiced on the previous page were confirmed. The nose shape on the model is too blunt and the nose light is not placed correctly. It may be a fixable error, but it is annoying when not only did they have the opportunity to get it right but they are also from the country where the kit subject originated and both companies responsible for the design and construction of it are still in existence to be consulted. That's to say nothing for examples in museums and a few flying examples between the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

To fix the kit errors, they have to make entirely new kits. A resin nose was made to fix the nose contour issues, which were the most immediately visible problem with the kits. However, the bigger problems came from Gavia trying to represent multiple L-410 variants from a common set of molds. There are quite few differences between L-410 variants that include: cabin window placement, windscreen size, main landing gear fairing design, wingspan, panel line detail and engine nacelle shape to name a few. I once considered buying a kit, but looking at it in the box in the shop, I was not convinced the scale was right. To my eyes, it looked rather overscale in some respects.

Ferry pilot was the new owner of the plane, so a nice DIY project for him. 🙂

Through December of 2023 and January 2024, An Aero 145 was flown nearly 20,000 kilometers from Australia to the Czech Republic. The 60+ year old aircraft was one of five of the type exported to Australia in the early 1960s and is the only one of those five aircraft still flying. There are less than ten of the type still flying worldwide. The aircraft is now part of the RAF Station Czechoslovakia historic aircraft collection and will be kept flying: https://www.tigermoth.cz/en/collection/aero-145-s-n-20-001-en The trip itself was quite an adventure, mostly due to bureaucracy headaches. Here's an interview with the pilot: https://english.radio.cz/pilot-flies-vintage-aero-145-australia-czechia-8807845 Needless to say, I'm really looking forward to seeing this aircraft at Czech airshows in the future.

That is insane!

This is quite an interesting conversation, expecially when nostaligia is brought up. It reminds me a lot of conversations I had with members of the generation before me in my native Canada, in the years following my graduation from college in the mid 1990s. I found myself with 10,000 Canadian dollars of student loan debt and a constant refrain from potential employers in my field of study saying "Come back when you have more experience". I was lucky enough to be living at home, but frustrated beyond belief at paying the loans off with mostly unrelated minimum wage work and infrequent freelance jobs related to my field of study. It was frustrating enough dealing with those things. Worse was getting admonished by those of the generation before me for being "careless" and "wasteful" with my money and how they were so much better about those things than my generation. Through their pink tinted glasses of nostalgia, they ignored the fact that they were tending to their post secondary education at a time when I was just entering primary school (mid 1970s). They also ignored the oil crisis of the late 1970s and the rampant hyperinflation of the early 1980s that followed, both of which irrevocably changed financial realities. Try to ask them what tuition cost in their day and they started getting evasive. They knew very well that tuition costs were out of control and what they had paid was paltry compared to what my generation was getting stuck with. Nostalgia blinds the nostalgic to anything negative from their prefered time period that could easily prove them wrong about their perception of it. Where myself and the hobby are concerned, I've bought one model in the last couple of years. It wasn't too bad as it was an Eduard kit, so domestic product for where I'm living these days that I could order straight from the manufacturer. I gave up on stashing ages ago. I used to impulse buy, but that seems to be a habit I've successfully broken. At some point along the way, the stash ceased to be that source of endless possibilities to me and became an overwhelming wall of "Why did I buy THAT?!". My understanding of the rising cost of models is that it's largely atributable to importers and distributors. I've met many people who would happily order a Hasegawa kit straight from Japan online rather than pay a local shop price with all the markups that entails after the shop has added their cut to the price. It makes a lot of sense when you think about how many 30+ year old kits Hasegawa puts in in new boxes with nothing but a fresh set of decals to make them different from previous releases. Another aspect, again where nostalgia plays in, comes when a manufacturer decides to takea chance on a subject that a lot of people are asking for, but then end up not buying; They have to offset that in the price of other kits. As I understand, the Airfix 1/72 Nimrod was a good example of that. Lots of people were asking for it for many years and Airfix decided to answer their call. From things I've heard, that kit didn't exactly fly off shelves in ways that demand indicated it might. The last time we had the Modellbrno show (2019, I think), I talked with a few people visiting from the UK and they said it was not uncommon to see multiples of the Nimrod kit in shops over there at deep discounts just to move them. I don't know if they were exagerating a bit, but a kit that size would be a sizable loss if not successful and they'd have to recover the cost through rising prices on other kits. OK, that post was rather longer than I intended, but the subject took me back a bit. Thanks for bearing with me if you read it all.

I gave up on FSM just a bit before I relocated from Canada to Europe, about 20 years ago. I had only ever bought it off bookshop shelves and only when there was enough in an issue to be of interest to me. I found myself finding less and less of interest in it and the quality of writing was clearly in decline at the time.

Hello all, I may be going to Edinburgh in April. As I know the National Museum of Flight in East Fortune is nearby, I'd like to work a visit there into my itinerary. I've got a few questions for anyone who has visitied it from Edinburgh. The museum website recommends buying a ticket online in advance. Is this really necessary? April would be fairly early in their operating season and not yet tourist season in general. Is it likely I could just go and buy a ticket at the door? If I go to the museum, it will be by bus. It looks like it will be a two bus deal with a transfer in Haddington in both directions. It looks like the two legs of the trip are handled by two different bus companies. Is it likely that I would be able to buy a ticket directly from the driver, or contactless payment terminal on the bus, or should I buy tickets online ahead of time? Thanks for any advice.

I completely agree. I'm a Canadian transplanted to the Czech Republic. One thing I love is that both countries have rich aviation histories. Unfortunately, in spite of those rich histories, most Canadian and Czech aircraft remain firmly niche interests. Good scale representations of either Canadian or Czech aircraft are rare. This is sad as both countries produced some interesting aircraft.

All I'm catching in the video regarding 1/72 Tempests is some aftermarket guns and wheels for the 1/72 Airfix Tempest kit. If they are thinking about a 1/72 Tempest Mk.II, I can't see it being fully new tooled. They put a Tempest II out in around 2005 or so, so they already have the molds for the existing styrene parts. All I can imagine is that they might replace the original resin parts with styrene or 3D print parts and the vac formed canopy with injected styrene: https://www.scalemates.com/kits/special-hobby-sh72103-hawker-tempest-mkii-in-raf-service--112322

The Bomarc might be, but I suspect the Canberra will be based on the Amodel B-57 B/C kit.

I hope it's just the angle of the photos, but I have some serious misgivings about the nose shape. The nose curvature in those photos looks perfectly round, with the opening for the light right at the tip. While the real thing definitely has a rounded nose, it's not perfectly rounded and the light is lower down on it. It's a very subtle thing and I hope these few shots show it reasonably: Again, I hope it's just the angle of the sprue pictures. I'll try to get to one of my local shops this week to see if they have the kit in stock so I can see it for myself.