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My second build will be the Eastern Express Viscount 800: Quite a nice kit - I built an EE Viscount 700 a year or two ago in another GB. I think this one will probably be in BA colours - I flew on BA Viscounts quite a lot between MAN and IOM when I was small, visiting my Manx grandparents, and I could paint it at the same time as the Trident. Manx is also a possibility though, although I have another EE kit and an F-RSIN kit as well though so maybe I'll build another one in Manx colours.

I've got a few things planned for this GB, not all of them will happen of course, but first up is a Trident 1C, using the Eastern Express kit. The Trident 1C is only just eligible - I'll be building G-ARPH (for no particular reason) which was delivered to BEA in March 1964. It'll be in British Airways colours - I have both the kit decals and a Two Six sheet to use for this. Here's the kit - looking forward to getting started: cheers Julian

Here's my Eastern Express 1/144 Viscount 800 finished as G-AOYM of British Airways using 26 Decals, just finished in the Baby Boomers group build. I flew on these between Manchester and the Isle of Man many times so this one has been high up the to-do list for a long time. Build thread is here: Thanks for looking Julian

Here's my Eastern Express 1/144 Trident 1C, with British Airways decals from 26, just finished in the Baby Boomers group build. Quite a nice kit - I have another in the stash (in an X-Scale box) and I'm looking forward to building it. Build thread is here: thanks for looking Julian

Here's my 1/144 Convair 880, just finished in the Turning Japanese GB. Build thread is here. Quite a nice kit, nice surface detail, went together well. The decals are from Vintage Flyer, it was my first experience of that brand and I'll be using them again. thanks for looking Julian

Time to start a third build. This is the Eastern Express 1/144 Convair 880, which I'll build in JAL colours from the early 1960s. Quite a nice looking kit in the box, it's short run but looks like good quality. I've built a couple of EE's more recent kits - Viscount and Dash 8 - and they've gone together pretty nicely, so hoping for more of the same from this one. Sprues: This kit comes with a pretty complete looking cockpit, which is pretty unusual for the scale, but I'll be using window decals so didn't bother with the cockpit and got straight on with assembling the fuselage. This meant assembling and fitting the nose undercarriage as it has to go in before the fuselage is closed up - so I'm going to have to be very, very careful not to break it! Fuselage went together ok, didn't have any problems blending in the clear part, and I've got the lower wing half attached. more soon Julian

The Ilyushin Il-18 is a four engine Soviet built turboprop airliner that made its maiden flight on July 4, 1957. It became one of the best known, the most durable and the most popular Soviet airliner of the era. The Il-18 was widely exported and it was one of the principal airliners of the Eastern block countries for several decades. In total 24 airlines have operated the plane and the military versions have been employed by 13 nations. I myself had once the possibility of experiencing the Il-18 on a flight from Belgrade to Warsaw in 1981. Due to the aircraft's air frame durability, many examples have achieved over 45,000 flight hours and the plane type still remains operational in both military and to a lesser extent civilian service. The production of the Il-18 took place between 1959-1978 with 719 planes of multiple civilian and military versions manufactured. Balkan Bulgarian Airlines was the national airline of Bulgaria, founded in 1947 as a Soviet-Bulgarian joint venture under the name TABSO. The company became fully owned by the Bulgarian state in 1954, and was renamed Balkan Bulgarian Airlines in 1968. At its peak, they were the second largest airline in Eastern Europe. Balkan Bulgarian Airlines went bankrupt in October 2002. Over the years, the Bulgarian airlines have operated a total of 18 units of Il-18 aircraft of different sub-types in its fleet. I built my model from an Eastern Express 1/144 scale kit which for a limited-run product was quite ok. The fit of the parts was generally good and the molding crisp. Naturally, there was some fitting and sanding to be done but nothing too much. To enhance the details of the bird I ordered an excellent Extratech photoetch set. The plane had a wire antenna between the rudder and an antenna above the cockpit for which I used a 0.08 mm fishing line. I decided to use the Balkan Airways livery decals of the kit. They were of very good quality and not too fragile. The Balkan Airlines LZ-BEV that my model depicts was of the Il-18V sub-type. I painted the white areas of the fuselage with Tamiya Fine Surface primer which I then coated with Tamiya gloss varnish spray. For the light grey underside of the fuselage, the wings and the stabs I used Revell 374 that I mixed slightly lighter with Revell 04. For the minor details I also used Vallejo, Revell and Humbrol paints.

Hi everybody, I finally finished my second model of the year..... At first I was bit sceptical as I hadn't done an Eastern Express model before, and what I heard / saw is that they werent always great to build. Nevertheless the A220 kit got rather decent reviews so at some point I decided to give it a try, as there are plenty of nice liveries / decals for it. To my surprise the kit is rather good. The fit of the fuselage, and cockpit part is surprisingly good and certainly better than on any Revell A321/ 320 neo I recently did. Sure one has to try and sand the parts before glueing, but if one does so one can get a decent result without too much effort. The wings are a bit fiddly and the panel lines there are rather thin, so I'd definitely recommend a scriber (which I did) as otherwise likely detais there will be barely visible. The gear is also a bit fiddly, but the engines are surprisingly easy and with a good separation of parts that makes painting easy. All in all a good kit and it certainly wont be my last A220, as I said plenty of nice ones outthere (Air Austral, Air Canada retro, just to name a few)... Initially it was going to be one of the Air Baltic specials, but I changed my plans and went for the Air Tanzania decals from Authentic Airliners. Those are excellent, one can see that those decals were actually tested on the real model, I whish other vendors would do that too - at least from time to time. It also comes with masks for the tail, so yes the blue is fully painted, which in my opinion is the better alternative than putting large decals over a curved area. A friend of mine (if you read this M. - THANKS) cut me some masks as well for the white part where the stabs meet the fuselage (that is the only critique point on the AA the white is faaar from being opaque - but thats a minor thing). And yeah I used some Nazca detail decals, as the kit comes with rather few and zero decals for wings / engines, which then would look pretty bland. Otherwise it was painted with Tamiya X-1,, Mr- Hobby Super Metallic SM201 for the silver edges and some self mixed blue. So here are the pics.. Thanks for looking and happy holidays! Julien

First of many high-winged options in my stash, picked for no particular reason (except maybe because I've never painted a model purple before), is the Eastern Express DHC-8 Q400. Here's what comes in the box: It's the Flybe boxing, which includes laser decals printed by PAS models - these should be quite nice, but I've also got screen printed decals from RJS, which I'll be using. It's short run but pretty nice - surface detail is pretty good. No locating pins, and some of the subassemblies are made up of multiple parts where a mainstream kit would have used one. A good example of this is the nose undercarriage - the wheel well is made up of 3 parts and the undercarriage leg is another 3 very small parts with quite soft detail, and the instructions aren't all that clear on how they go together! The nose gear also has to go in the fuselage before it's assembled so I've started with that. I think I've got it right. Here's the assembled fuselage (with the Viscount 700 from the French Fancy GB in the background): thanks for looking Julian

Here's my Eastern Express 1/144 Viscount 700 finished in Air Inter colours using decals from F-DCAL, which I've just finished in the French Fancy group build. Build thread is here. thanks for looking Julian

Hi All. Here is another of my completed models. It is the Eastern Express Convair 990A Coronado with my own 26Decals plus Authentic Airliners windows. Kit went together really well after cleaning up the parts and can recommend it Cheers Ray

I've got several builds in mind for this GB, most of which probably won't happen, but I'll start with a British classic in French colours - a Vickers Viscount in the colours of the French domestic airline Air Inter, using the 1/144 Eastern Express kit and decals from F-DCAL. Here's the shot of the sprues and decals: It looks like quite a nice kit, so I'm surprised I haven't seen more of them built on BM. There's a cockpit interior, which won't be visible on my model as I'll be using window decals, and I'm a little surprised that they've given us clear parts for the cabin windows rather than decals. I've made a start by filling in the cabin windows, since I'm using window decals, but not got further than that yet. more soon Julian

Here's my Eastern Express 1/144 Bombardier Q400 with RJS decals for the Flybe scheme. Build thread is here in the High Wing group build. The purple looks far too blue in these photos, I found it really hard to photograph indoors and haven't got the white balance right. I'll try and get a better photo in natural light. For now you'll just have to trust me when I say the Tamiya X-16 purple I used looks pretty good and close enough to photos of the real thing that it's acceptable to my eyes! I quite liked the kit. It's a short run kit with a little fettling needed, but still a fairly straightforward build. The RJS decals are nice, but I decided not to use the decals for the yellow and red bands around the tail - the instructions said they should go over white paint, so it was going to need some precise masking, so I decided that if I was masking it that precisely I might as well just paint the yellow and red bands! thanks for looking Julian