Work In Progress

Indeed, we have the benefit of hindsight and a lot of the conventional wisdom of the era turned out not to be so. One of the the unusual features of the paint scheme of this aeroplane is the colour of the spinners as a variation on the early-war fighter scheme, and indeed the scheme itself, which is anachronistic for the time of the flight trials by RAF pilots in Burbank. If they had actually gone into RAF service in, say, September '41 they would have been in Day Fighter Scheme with Sky spinners and rear bands, and probably yellow leading edges - very much the scheme seen on the short-lived 601 Squadron Airacobra deployment. I might do a What-If in that scheme some time. It would look good alongside an Airacobra.

Sabotage is a funny word to use, and a harsh moral judgment against the Commision members. Why would they _want_ to make their own lives difficult? Much easier just not to order the thing at all. What they wanted was something that in itself was an objective with some attractions: to reduce maintenance problems and make the supply chain rational, by specifying an engine which was already in RAF service in large numbers in the P-40. Logistics is a real and vastly under-rated problem in military effort. So it's not necessarily an unreasonable question to put to Lockheed : "Can we have this aeroplane, but with the very similar engines we're already buying in bulk for the P-40? And will that be OK?" I see that my sentence in my earlier post was ambiguously worded., so let me clarify. I wrote: "Lockheed said they would hold the Air Ministry to its much larger order - it wasn't Lockheed's fault that they'd ordered a version with the wrong spec, so they wanted paying." I intended the meaning "Lockheed argued it wasn't its fault that the aircraft were the wrong spec", not "it wasn't Lockheed's fault" . In fact Lockheed actually did know better, but the argument in Lockheed was between the commercial side of the business over-ruling the engineers in accepting an order which the engineers knew would not lead to a good aeroplane. Short-term commercial greed won out over the longer term interests of the aeroplane and the business. If Lockheed has said "Nope, we're not going to make those, it's superchargers and handed engines or nothing", then whichever way _that_ choice had fallen would have been better than what did. So, it was an idea which turned out badly, but war is full of those (e.g the P-39 experiment which also didn't work out in RAF service) and you can't pin it wholly on the Commission. If the Commission had been working for the wrong side then they wouldn't have brought about the introduction of the Martlet, Mustang or Lockheed's own Hudson, all of which were extremely successful procurements, though none of those were nailed-on certain successes either at the time they were ordered.

It is said to be, er, challenging. You might already have seen this absolutely splendid example which went on display a couple of weeks ago: https://fonfasite.wordpress.com/2019/05/12/hamilcar-glider-diorama-added-to-the-heritage-centre-collection/ Might be worth contacting them and asking to be put in touch with whoever did that one, because he's probably the best Sanger Hamilcar builder in the world, and certainly the one with the most current experience!

I've never seen one of those before. Great job and thanks for sharing!

They didn't. RAF test pilots flew the prototype in California, realised it had various doggy aspects and said it wouldn't do. The Air Ministry attempted to cancel all but three examples, and thereby got into a big contract argument with Lockheed. Lockheed said they would hold the Air Ministry to its much larger order - it wasn't Lockheed's fault that they'd ordered a version with the wrong spec, so they wanted paying. Nothing except hot air happened until the Pearl Harbour panic, when the US entered the war whereupon the USAAF nabbed the lot, thus neatly solving the commercial argument. Eventually, three of them were exported to the UK for trials at various research establishments in Spring '42. They were unsurprisingly found to be still fairly useless as potential combat aircraft and the Air Ministry sent the three back to the USA again. The Lightning I and Lightning II never reached an RAF squadron. Much later in the war one or two Droop Snoot versions were borrowed by Bomber Command to try them out for pathfinder duties, but as far as I know officially those continued to be USAAF machines. Edit: In my hurry to do history, I forgot to say congratulations, Mr T, that is a beautiful model. The Lightning when saddled with a pair of mere P-40 engines might not have been much of a weapon but it shared the visual appeal of its more successful siblings. And it does look good in those colours.

It is always confusing when people drag years-old threads out of the darkness. If people have something new to say about a particular kit it would be much better to start a new thread in the relevant general discussion forum, in this case either Cold War or Rumourmonger, not in an antique WIP thread

Given that I have only ever seen one of they Academy kits built as Race 80, there must be a lot of the appropriate decals floating around spare. See also this post:

Me too. It's such a pretty scheme for the aeroplane, The aftermarket decal makers are asleep in this one.

It would have to be comparable to the Victor in terms of detailing or it would get a massive kicking on every internet forum in the world. Of coruse there will be people who complain about the price, but they always do. The current kit is really not great at all. It was quite a tough thing to build when it was new and the tooling has not aged at all well. I haven't seen a single build on here or the other main fora which has not experienced quite significant fit problems. And there's the perennial problem of the intakes and tailpipes. Even on Airfix's own forum it's rather a litany of woe: https://www.airfix.com/uk-en/forum/post/view/topic_id/14778/

Well, they did a Victor and a Valiant against my expectations so I am sure it will come around eventually. But yes, anything that size is a bit specialised and hefty for multiple sales in 1/72. I think it's no coincidence that we've seen new tool Vulcans in 1/144 and 1/200 recently rather than anything larger. Most people can find space for a few of those.

Put it back on eBay with a photo of the malformed part with a 99p starting price. Someone who is happy to make a new tail out of sheet stock will be happy to take it off your hands. Obviously it will go for a lot less than a complete kit but it will bring in enough to malke it worth the trouble, and you have already had your money back so it's all gravy.

As a Swede your Google experience will be different from that of an English Googler in any case. And if you are logged in to a Google / Android service, and/or or haven't deleted cookies, then you will get personalised search results anyway, not the same as another person would get searching the same terms. It is problematic though. The top Mustang Google results in the English language refer to cars, not aeroplanes. And looking at "Zero", what you you actually use as the search term? "A6M Zero" gives a different result from "Mitsubishi Zero", and for me the top results for the naked word "Zero" are a Hindi-language movie and an electri motorbike company.

And Concorde: "About 67,100,000 results (0.37 seconds) "

I shall be very surprised if Xtradecal does not release the FAA Hellcats they've done in other scales

And for the British general public, still the Concorde