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upnorth

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About upnorth

  • Birthday 15/08/1972

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    Brno, Czech Republic

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  1. 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
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. Ferry pilot was the new owner of the plane, so a nice DIY project for him. 🙂
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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
  13. The Bomarc might be, but I suspect the Canberra will be based on the Amodel B-57 B/C kit.
  14. 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.
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