ChrisL

All look impressive but most are outside of my areas of knowledge. I do like the big wing Sea Harrier though. What's the deal with the thing that looks a bit like a Hawker Fury with a non-Sabre non-radial engine?

That looks great! I have a Mk I boxing of the same kit in a cupboard somewhere, bought in a ModelZone sale. I was a bit surprised when I got home and opened the box to discover the cannons moulded onto the wings, with the instructions telling me to chop them off and fit decals over the gap left to represent the patches that covered the Mk I's machine guns' barrels.

The F-14 is my least favourite of the teen series fighters. It used to scrap for that spot with the F-16, probably mostly because of its big gaping mouth, but as a kid I got a fairly cheap 1/48 Hasegawa F-16C and it built up well so it went up in my estimation. I like the cobra hood thing that the F-18 has going on from some angles but my favourite teen series fighter is the F-15. For me it seems to be some sort of ideal form for that generation of jet fighter. (For reference, the Phantom is its predecessor, then the Starfighter before that, for that accolade.) I've never been a huge fan of the F-111, though that may have been influenced by its part in the downfall of the TSR.2. The Vulcan is completely eclipsed in my affections by the Victor, probably initialy because I got the matchbox kit as a Christmas present when I was a kid, but since then I have grown to love its aesthetics. There's something of the Flash Gordon rocket ship about the Victor! The Lightning is not a huge draw for me, the F-4 seems to be stealing the "so ugly it's beautiful" attention from it. I have always been more of a Hurricane fan than a Spitfire fan, though curiously I have far more Spitfires and Seafires stashed away than Hurricanes. I think it's almost impossible to fight against the tide of Spitfires in the modelling industry! The only Supermarine jet that interests me is the Scimitar and even then its aesthetics are very directional - from some angles it looks nice, from some it's pretty nasty looking. Possibly the oddest thing that I have a soft spot for is the Sea Hawk. Somehow I think its straight wings and smoothly bulging fuselage make it look much nicer than rough contemporaries such as the MiG-15 or the Hunter (not to mention the F-86, whose low-slung wing immediately rules it out of any beauty contest).

I was at Duxford a couple of weeks ago. I think that at that time the F-4J was tucked away in a deep dark corner in the American air museum. While I got some long range photos of other aircraft in that building I didn't get one of the Phantom so can't confirm that. On the other hand I have no photos of it in any of the other hangers and I'm pretty sure I'd have photographed it if I could!

I notice that you've attached the cockpit's side consoles to the cockpit floor. The instructions would have you attach them to the fuselage sides. Your way looks like it might be easier for painting their top sides (called out as black rather than interior green in the instructions). Does it look like everything will come together without hitches when they're assembled in this order? It looks like there may be some locating tabs on the fuselage sides that might interfere if they're not removed, depending on how everything comes together.

I had idly wondered recently how to make something that was recognisably an X-Wing while also making it look a bit more modern - ideally less boxy, and with a bubble cockpit canopy for better visibility. That looks like you've done exactly the sort of thing I was thinking about!

I'm a big fan of the Sea Hawk and that is an excellent representation of it. Mind you I suspect that I'd like anything that has yellow and black Suez strips on it.

I really like the clean and precise way you've represented the Merlin, it looks great. I'm not sure it'd be so appropriate for a Sea King, though.

I have the Olimp intakes and will (eventually) put them into a Revell Typhoon. It looks like they will fit the intake mouth OK. I've needed to trim the front wheel well a bit in order to make space for the intake trunking. I'm modelling the Typhoon wheels up so this isn't a problem for me but I think with care you'd be able to thin it enough to fit the intakes without compromising the wheel well. I obviously have nothing to add about their suitability for the Hasegawa kit but despite the reputation of the Olimp exhausts I don't think the intakes are too wrong.

That's a great build of an unusual thing! I did not know that this variant of the Churchill existed. It reminds me somewhat of some of the Rhino and Land Raider conversions that White Dwarf were publishing at the end of the '80s. One or two seemed to follow a similar plan of building a big box onto an existing chassis and sticking an incongrously large gun out of its front.

Nearer 3 hours, according to Google (or just over 3 hours if I take the more interesting road) but that's still a lot closer than most other options - thanks!

Thanks everyone for all the suggestions, I'll keep this thread in mind when planning trips! I was however at the Science Museum (including the top floor) last year, it seems that my mind chose not to categorise that as an aviation museum, though.

I thought it looked quite nice when I saw it at RIAT last year, though by the time I saw it (on Sunday) the dummy weapon pylons had been removed. Some pictures of it in flight make it look less good though. It seems to be divided fairly strongly between good and bad sides aesthetically. I like the idea of the aircraft, that in a lot of situations a relatively basic aircraft can do mid-altitude, long loiter CAS and other missions just as well as planes that cost much more to procure and to operate. I'm not convinced though that many air forces are going to buy into the less is more philosophy it entails when traditionally every pilot wants a super shiny supersonic wonderplane to fly. Also whether the low cost philosophy would survive the sort of procurement process that air forces such as the RAF or USAF employ is open to debate. After all wasn't the original requirement that gave the world the F-16 for a relatively basic and low cost aircraft?

Which of these would be close to IWM Duxford? I am under the impression that the Shuttleworth Collection isn't too far away. For my 40th birthday some friends bought me a flight in a Dragon Rapide in close formation with a Spitfire at Duxford, so I'll be visiting it again in the not too distant future. Making a bigger trip out of it would be good. The Norfolk & Suffolk Air Museum looks like one candidate.

I realised I'd forgotten to include Yeolvilton just before I read your post! And I did indeed visit it as part of a trip that included visits to Stonehenge and Avebury - also Bovington and the Air Tattoo too. I will add Bruntingthorpe, Newark, Doncaster, et al to the list of potentials. There's also the Highland Aviation Museum, up near Inverness. My parents went there last year. It's not big but it allows access to most of the cockpits of their display aircraft (weather permitting). Mind you, getting from Edinburgh to Inverness is hardly a short trip either!

Over the past few years I've managed to visit the following aviation museums: National Museum of Flight, East Fortune Yorkshire Air Museum RAF Museum Cosford Midland Air Museum (Coventry) IWM Duxford RAF Museum Hendon Jet Age Museum (Gloucester) Fleet Air Arm Museum (Yeolvilton) Tangmere Military Aviation Museum What other museums would you suggest to me? Primarily I'm interested in military aviation. I live in Edinburgh, so if a museum is far away it'll probably need a big draw in order to get me interested in making the journey to visit it (unless I can find other reasons to be in the area). Edit: I forgot the FAA museum!

I gather that the latest Hasegawa kit includes additional parts that address the major differences between the base F-15D kit and the F-15E, but it still obviously has F-15D panel lines and the like. In fact, see this post from an earlier thread, as that is from where I got that impression.

It's smiling.

I went there last summer and really enjoyed my visit. My friends and I got to have a good look around their exhibits before receiving a very entertaining tour along with several other visitors from a retired 1 Squadron ground crewman. It's quite a crowded museum so I didn't get many decent photos of the Swift, but looking at them one panel line that stands out is a horizontal one running along the fuselage about halfway between the top of the wing and the top of the fuselage. In most of my shots of the Swift the rivets are probably actually a little more visible than the panel lines. Overall it's certainly "cleaner" than their 1 Squadron Hunter, which has a similar high gloss camo paint job. One additional thing that I really quite liked about the museum is that its car park is right next to those aircraft it has on outdoor display. Normally we see planes in their own context, it was quite interesting to realise that compared to cars even jets that'd usually be considered pretty small (Meteors, Harriers) are really rather large indeed!

I recall reading in an air show programme last year that the planes are rotated between pilots in order to balance out their fatigue lives. Some positions in the display place more stress on the airframes than do others and there's not that many spare parts kicking around for early Hawks any more so they don't want to wear some planes out too soon!

Except you re-state the OP's criteria at the top of your post and units sold is only one of three. I'm sure also that the OP was intended as the springboard for a discussion rather than a set of concrete rules meant to shut down debate. It's unfortunate in some ways that out of the three criteria only units sold is an easily measurable thing. It's not like we can counterbalance the Phantom's 5,000 units sold against the F-15's 8,000 points of innovation. I suppose you could use some sort of MTBF or maintenance hours per flight hour metric for reliability but it's apparently much easier to find the number built of each type. Even with the apparently clear cut units sold criteria you can argue on the interpretation. Yes, lots more MiG-15s were built than any other type, but isn't that unfair to more modern fighters, given air arms have been shrinking for decades? What percentage of fighters sold since the late '70s have been F-16s? I'm betting it's quite high, and almost certainly a higher percentage than the percentage of jet fighter sales that were Phantoms over its sales lifespan, as there are fewer designs available for sale these days. I don't know how it would stack up against the MiG-15 if sales are measured like this, especially as the Soviet Bloc gave the MiG a useful captive market, but I'd bet it looks better than the 28,000:4,500 units built ratio would at first suggest.

You say the seatbelts are decals, but while I can see things that look like seatbelts on the PE fret, I can't see anything similar on the decal sheet... Thanks for the review. I've been intruiged by the Zulu Cobra since I saw a program that had a segment on what must have been the prototype, on a Discovery-type channel a few years ago. It is an impressive evolution of the stripped-down, skinny Cobra that first took to the skies. It looks like the designers have put quite a lot of effort into finding extra places to mount weapons and making it look as mean as possible!

I think it's at least partially because the Falklands war happened when many Britmodellers were at impressionable ages. As a child growing up in the UK at the time the war was impossible to ignore and in retrospect much of what happened was already being mythologised as it occurred. Yomping, viffing and many other things were held up as signs of good old British pluck and ingenuity and were milked for all they were worth. It isn't surprising that the conflict made the Harrier the ultimate jet fighter for a generation of British boys. It was much later that I learnt how many other factors influenced those dogfights, such as the Argentinian aircraft having to fight at the edge of their range and the shiny AIM-9Ls that the Sea Harriers were armed with.

I'm not sure it's quite as easy to assess innovation as you suggest. Some innovations are far more obvious and attention grabbing by others but that does not necessarily mean that they stand the test of time. An example of this is one you highlighted yourself - people point to the Harrier as innovative, but VSTOL is not an innovation that has proved particularly influential. On the other hand the innovations of something like the Phantom are much less obvious, after all it wasn't the first Mach 2+ fighter, or the first fighter bomber, or the first all weather fighter. In addition, innovations in reliability or internal engineering are almost invisible to people with an outsider's perspective. Aircraft like the F-15 and the F-16 apparently made great strides in maintainability simply through providing better access to internal systems and packaging systems as LRUs but nobody's mentioned much of that sort of thing when making the cases for those jets here. The influence of a fighter requires a good deal of hindsight to assess, I think. It's not until the following generation of jets arrive that you can really see what innovations proved to be successful and worth carrying over. The Phantom and then the F-15 were/are fast, but what seems to have been carried on from the Eagle is its manoeuvrability, not its speed. The Tomcat's radar and missile capability was impressive, but wasn't considered vital enough to be necessary to the same extent in the Super Hornet. I wonder what will be considered in the long run to be the most important innovations included in 5th generation fighters? Obviously stealth is the headline-grabbing innovation, but I've read some things which suggest that the battlespace awareness produced by networking aircraft and other sensor sources together, along with the software which reduces the effort required to fly a plane, giving pilots more time to understand that battlespace is also a major step change from 4th generation's technologies. On the other hand, the thrust vectoring that went into the Raptor is barely mentioned nowadays, despite manoeuvrability being one of the big targets for fighters for the past 40 years or so.

While it's not something I know the answer to, I wonder how it'd look if we changed the first criteria from number built to profitability, or revenue generated? How many MiGs were sold primarily because they were dirt cheap compared to western options? Were jets sold as loss-leaders to tie countries in to military alliances or reliance on ordnance supplies? Presumably you could also deduct the bribe money from the income Lockheed made from selling the Starfighter to NATO.