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I've started thinking about my planned 1/48 "Special Duties" Lysander, and I ran across something in Hugh Verity's We Landed By Moonlight which has puzzled me. I'm aiming to model an aircraft as it would have appeared on the ground in France during a pick-up, and had assumed that this would involve wing slats extended and flaps lowered. But in Peter Proctor's appendix on "Modifications to the Lysander" he says, "I also remember the pilots telling the passengers to push back the automatic flaps as they left the aircraft." I think this means that the passengers in the rear compartment lifted the flaps into the horizontal position (thereby also retracting the inner slats) once they had the rear canopy open. I've certainly seen photographs of parked aircraft with the flaps raised, so presumably this was possible to do, despite the entirely automatic operation in flight--I just can't puzzle out why they would do this, minutes before a short-field take-off.

This is the Eduard/Gavia 1/48 Lysander "Limited Edition", which comes with a bunch of additional photoetch and resin parts, and a truly horrible "Lord of the Rings" typeface on the box It comes with parts and decals for a number of aircraft, but not the one I wanted to build. My model is of T1508, the all-black Special Duties Lysander of B Flight, 138 Squadron, written off by Squadron Leader John Nesbitt-Dufort in a field in France in the early hours of 29 January 1942. After picking up Maurice Duclos and Roger Mitchell in a field near Segry, Nesbitt-Dufort ran into "the most wicked looking and well defined cold front I have ever seen" along the north coast of France. After several attempts to get under and then through this monstrosity, he found himself in severe icing conditions--a gloved hand pushed into the airstream grew a "thick glass gauntlet" of ice in twenty seconds. His passengers in the rear compartment had not donned their helmets, so he couldn't communicate with them. (It later transpired they hadn't donned their parachute harnesses either.) He made a forced landing with no airspeed indicator, and tipped the aircraft on its nose in a ditch. There was so little fuel in the aircraft he was unable to set it on fire even after firing three Very cartridges into it. (But it was later successfully destroyed by the Germans who, in attempting to tow it away, managed to have it hit by a train.) He and his companions spent some time on the run (hampered by the fact that Nesbitt-Dufort's survival kit contained only reichsmarks and a map of Germany) and were later pulled out of France by a Special Duties Anson. I have a couple of photographs of the crashed aircraft: I added control surfaces and slats from Czech Masters, though I had to build my own inboard slats (which are mysteriously absent from the CMK set) copying an excellent idea from @dnl42. I was able to repurpose kit decals for the pre-1942 markings, and used Fantasy Printshop 8" red characters for the tail number. There were a few modifications necessary to make the aeroplane look like it was sitting on the ground, some major adjustments to the appearance of the rear compartment, and a bit of razor-saw work so that I could open the canopy. Build log is here: I'm also grateful to @dogsbody for putting me right on the engine colour. Paints are Tamiya and LifeColor, with panel lines and some weathering using LifeColor Liquid Pigment. As an after-thought I added some O-gauge luggage and parcels to the rear compartment. These aircraft frequently flew in SOE agents carrying French luggage, as well as supplies for the French Resistance. The little white "4" on the side of the aircraft is inspired by a remark in Barbara Bertram's marvellous memoir French Resistance In Sussex. She says that the number of packages to be removed from the rear compartment was always chalked on the side of the aircraft, so that nothing would be missed during the frenzied few minutes on the ground, working by moonlight, unloading and then loading the aircraft. Here she is:

Test assembly of the model. The main task was to show the capabilities of this set. I hope you will like it. [/url