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Three tenths of a second before the music died


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Beechcraft Bonanza N3794N, February 3, 1959. 1/48 from the Minicraft kit, figures are hacked about US pilot/ground crew from Hasegawa. The snow is baking powder which seems to be working fine for me - I know some people have trouble with it.


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It's Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper just about to check out. Interesting idea, well executed. I can see why some people might not feel comfortable with it but I don't see any difference to a dio featuring battle damage or corpses.

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I think it's uncomfortable because it's civilians about to die in an accident.

The diorama is cleverly done from a modeling perspective. 

It's a thought provoking discussion isn't it, what's acceptable and what isn't. 

Extrapolating the theme would a destroyed PanAm 103 on the ground be ok?

And yet the diorama of the dying shot German soldier with his comrade calling for a medic was acclaimed by everyone as a powerful piece. Is it down to the numbers involved? 

 

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Uncomfortable ?  Yet there are many dioramas of the nasty Hun tank going up in flames, the B17 releasing its load, the cowboy shooting the injun, the US marines about to ambush terrorists and of course U-boat stern sticking out of the water or Titanic going under.  All human tragedy.  Would it have been different if the Bonanza was a JU88 coming in to a corn field in Kent?   A philosophical discussion to be had perhaps over a pint; however I could not say the subject was any more or less tasteless because it is civilian as one must remember many conflict armed casualties were conscript.  Portraying a soldier's corpse is as tasteless or as evocative - depending on whose side he was on.  Well done for imagination.

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Modelling soldiers' corpses is a demonstration of bad taste in my book.  I consider modelling the imminent demise of an aircraft and its occupants - especially carefully incorporating their reactions - to be in equally bad taste, no matter how neatly the model is completed. Sorry if that bluntness winds people up but, unlike (I suspect) most other posters here, I've had close encounters with both the mechanical and human results of real aviation accidents.  Without listing details, if you had seen it then you definitely wouldn't want to model it.  Please believe me.

 

Plus, as a professional pilot who has spent a career trying hard to avoid spreading my constituent parts across Mother Earth, and who has had too many friends and former colleagues fail to avoid it, I'm afraid that I just find models that carefully highlight imminent death to be, well, unnecessary.

 

Different views are available, but mine is unlikely to change.

 

Jon

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I too find that I don't like dioramas depicting corpses, injuries and death. There is a fine line in military modelling of tastefulness and sometimes people cross it. When I build dioramas I'm trying to tell a story but I very seldom try to tell an unpleasant story as there is already enough of that around without me adding to it. instead I'll try to find the amusing... a tanker running over a badly parked Military Policeman's motorbike, a French farmer letting his pigs block a bridge from tanks crossing and so on.

 

This is a novel idea, well executed but I'm afraid I don't like the story it is telling.

 

Sorry.

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On 11/23/2016 at 5:44 PM, Doug Rogers said:

Is it down to the numbers involved? 

 

 

I think that it's more a case of it being 'Someone' rather than 'just someone'. People who we know/know of are actual people, whereas the generic soldier/sailor/airman is just a figure.

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Aside from the fact that I find this pretty tasteless, there are a number of inaccuracies:

  1. The Bonanza hit the ground sharply banked to the right and nose down and then cartwheeled over 500 feet before coming to rest against the fence.
  2. The accident happened at night in very poor visibility. It's unlikely the occupants had any opportunity to react before they hit the ground.
  3. The most likely cause was the pilots spatial disorientation which was compounded by the old style attitude gyro which behaves in an opposite sense to a conventional artificial horizon. The pilot was also not instrument rated.
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That is an interesting diorama and it is well done. It does raise some interesting questions which are asked here regarding the depiction of death (or the moment before death). Would anyone want to see a diorama of John Lennon the moment before he was fatally shot? Or of Jayne Mansfield just before she was decapitated in her car crash? I don't think I would. I've built many models of Il-2 Shturmoviks, which I estimate killed something like a million or so Axis soldiers, yet I've never modelled one where you can see one of its 23-mm cannon shells splitting a German soldier in half, or just about to, with the German soldier screaming in mortal terror, yet I know that happened in real life. But to each his or her own, I suppose.

 

Regards,

 

Jason

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I think your diorama is well done, the idea is unique and the subject might be sad but it's not distasteful. My only problem is that it's a bit hard to read, at first I thought that the airplane was caught by the fence and it is now resting on the top of it (but I knew nothing about the accident).

 

Military modelling was also mentioned multiple times so here is my opinion: as long as the violence and/or suffering doesn't go overboard for shock value, I'm fine with showing the bloody side of war.

 

I have a few dioramas which depict injuries (I find medics pointless without them) but never death. Oddly enough, I guess my veteran grandfather would disagree with my decision to avoid corpses. He fought in WW2 and he turned off the TV every time he saw a "Hollywood" war movie. He just couldn't stand the "sterile" portrayal of violence and lack of suffering in them and how they glorified the worst experience of his life. However, he liked films/books which were a bit more realistic and were closer to what he lived through. So I assume he would tell me to avoid military modelling altogether or at least do it "right".

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Interesting diorama and very well done. The snow field is excellent, it looks COLD.

 

Controversial subject though and a very sad moment.

I think I'd have done the coin toss before boarding the plane if I were to model the subject.

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  • 5 months later...

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