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Three things accompany and fascinate me throughout my life: history, the fine arts and the fascination of aeroplanes and ships. In the many aspects of model making, these fascinations come together quite happily.
In this respect, I take the freedom to build anything and in any scale that occupies me. In practice, these are mainly aircraft in 1:48 and 1:32 scale, but lately the 1:72 and even the 1:144 scale have developed a great fascination for me.
As a child of the 1970s, I am aware of the scale in which the offers, possibilities and demands in plastic modelling have developed: we are living in truly great times... aren't we?
The Fokker F.VII "Trimotor" was undoubtedly one of the great designs in the history of aviation. Its design reflected the optimistic spirit of the up-and-coming aviation of the early 1920s, just as the success story or stories of [...]
The powerful and agile Yak 50 can be considered one of the great designs in the field of aerobatics: since its appearance in 1973, it has repeatedly written success stories at competitions and was the declared favourite aircraft of [...]
When looking at some of the flying machines, the question immediately arises as to how anyone could believe that something like this would ever take off! In fact, the original of the WWA-14 M1 shown here has flown - and not at all badly, [...]
To the original: Grunau Baby IIb
Who would have thought that this small and inconspicuous glider was capable of setting world records? Especially when the type name "Baby" doesn't exactly conjure up images of great importance or [...]
NASA's namesakes loved (and love) to be mythological and classical: an overview of the space flight programmes and spaceship names buzzes with gods and goddesses from classical Greek mythology. One god's name in particular stands out from [...]
How do you write about a model that is a weapon of mass destruction? The Convair SM-65 Atlas was the first intercontinental ballistic missile available to the Strategic Air Command (SAC) of the US Air Force from 1959. Both the partly [...]
I would like to preface this article with one remark: I have hardly found such amazingly good and varied photographic material for any other aircraft of this era than in the search for material on the H.P.42 Heracles! In pictures whose [...]
What must it have sounded like when Kuttelwascher's British superiors first tried to pronounce his name? Unfamiliar even to German ears, Karel's family name must have been a hard nut to crack for English-speaking tongues. Pragmatically, it [...]
If you take a look at aviation in the 1920s and 1930s, you soon come across a circumstance that must have been characteristic of this time: the constant struggle for more performance, prestige and, ultimately, sales figures materialised in [...]
A fuselage with metal covering, in which the glazed, closed cockpit is just as aerodynamically cleanly incorporated as the engine nacelles are blended into the shapes of the wings, a retractable landing gear, variable pitch propellers: [...]
