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I got rather excited after seeing that the KP Avia S-199 was available from Hannants. So I rushed off an order and got several of them in less than a week (which is remarkable since I live in Pennsylvania). I had been moving along with two Fine Molds Romanian Bf 109 G-6s, but a when the Avia arrived there was little doubt that it would jump to the front of the line. The initial impressions were very good. The quality of the molding is good and KP has gotten the little details right. As an example the fuselage radio access panel has a smaller panel in the middle which is correctly reproduced. Also the cowl bump has the appropriate strake to cover the engine mount, but also a smaller strake to cover the Focke Wulf type cocking mechanism on later S-199s. The instructions correctly point that this strake should be removed in the earlier Israeli birds, but left for the Czech models. There have already been numerous build-ups on Czech sites, some of these are quite excellent. So let's have a go at it... The cockpit looks basically identical to the previous 109s from AZ, and is more than adequate. I sprayed it with Gunze lacquer RLM 02 and used a MIG Pigment enamel wash. This worked OK and dried very quickly. Details were picked out with yellow and blue paint. The seat belts are Eduard pre-painted items and the instrument panel is from a Fine Molds 109 G kit, simply because I painted five of them simultaneously. The dials are decals from the FM kit, placed in very hot water and applied over Micro Sol. This seemed to work better than other methods, including Solvaset. I will add some more washes using oils and a bit more detail painting next. I intend this to be a quick build to see whether this kit captures the look of the Avia, or perhaps I should return to the Fine Molds conversion that I started a few years ago. We'll see... The next item for attention is the wing. Nearly all Avias had circular wheel wells, similar to the later 109 F variants. I decided to use .015" Evergreen sheet to blank off part of the well, then cut and sand to shape. Here are the inserts, sealed with super glue. After using a circle template to mark the area, I cut the plastic sheet with a scalpel then finished with sandpaper wrapped around a Prismacolor pencil. At this point I primed to check for imperfections. After a bit of tweaking, I gave the area a coat of RLM 02, which will be the final colour. In retrospect, I could have only blanked off the corners since most of the plastic sheet was removed . The shell ejection ports were also filled, since they didn't exist on the Avia. Interestingly, the Bf 109 G-10 restoration in the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville Oregon seems to have Avia wings. The original wings were scrapped while the plane was stored in Georgia and replacements were found in Czechoslovakia. http://www.taphilo.com/Photo/Pictures/Me109-G10.jpg