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Or a teeny, tiny triangle! Less affectionately, this was known as the Black Widowmaker. Charming. It had a short life, crashing three weeks after its first flight. Fortunately, the test pilot "Ben" Gunn managed to eject safely first (in the process gaining the dubious honour of becoming the first person to successfully eject from a delta wing aircraft). That's him on the right. Looks pretty unflappable to me. He was a Spitfire and then a Tempest pilot during the war and shot down the last V1 of the war over the South Downs so I guess you could say it figures. Also - somewhat unusually for a test pilot from the 1950s - he lived to the ripe old age of 76. He wrote a memoir which I'm trying to track down. This is the Boulton-Paul P.120, the last aircraft that Boulton-Paul designed and built and an evolution of the outwardly very similar P.111 (the main change is in the tail). Both the P.120 and P.111 were testbeds, designed to evaluate different delta wing configurations at various speeds. The P.111 was very tricky to fly because of its power-operated controls gave the pilot little feedback. This was sort of resolved in the P.120, after the controls were spring-loaded - it was a bit more docile but retained some unpredictable handling quirks that could not be ironed out. In preparation for the 1952 Farnborough Airshow this was repainted from its natural metal finish to this sharkish black and yellow livery, though it crashed and was destroyed before the airshow took place. This is the 144th.co.uk kit and it's a little beauty. Resin and removing the parts from the casting blocks takes a bit of time and care, but the overall fit is really good and it's a pretty simple build. I am ashamed to say I started this way back in 2019, and it has sat dormant in its box over various house moves ever since. The reason was that the kit does not have a transparent canopy (but it does have a separate solid resin one) and I stubbornly wanted one... so I made a smash-moulded one which I fitted earlier this week after years of procrastination. I believe it was worth the effort and am frankly delighted with the results - now scratching my head wondering why I kept putting this back in the box again. After that it was a simple question of masking the canopy and painting the whole thing black. The decals are superb - really, really nice. I think they are printed by either Cartograf or Fantasy Printshop and are very sharp and vivid. I replaced the thick undercarriage doors with plasticard and added some aerials and pitots from scratch. But that's about it. A quick build that I just took an appallingly long time over. I've started the P.111a so that should join this in - oh - 3-5 years too. Finally with another, larger British triangle... Thanks very much for looking! Angus
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