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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?

A baby with amazing talents: Grunau Baby IIb school glider

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 [...]

"The Two Faces of the Atlas", Part II: John Glenn and Friendship 7 on Mercury Mission MA-6!

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 [...]

"The two faces of the Atlas", Part I: Convair SM-65 Atlas D, US first intercontinental ballistic missile

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 [...]

Flying the Orient Express: the Handley Page H.P.42 Heracles!

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 [...]

"Night Reaper": a daring Czech pilot as a nighthawk

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 [...]

On the wings of a hot desert wind: Caudron C.632 Simoun F-ANXA

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 [...]

DC 2 J-BBOT „Aso“: lost over the vastness of the Pacificand actually rescued!

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: [...]

The lady in red: DH.88 Comet, De Havilland's true wooden wonder!

The centenary celebration of the Australian state of Victoria, a wealthy chocolate manufacturer, an innovative aircraft manufacturer and a national aviation industry that had a lot of catching up to do: these are the essential ingredients [...]

Finally successful: Juno I/Explorer I, the first US satellite in orbit!

Pictures tell stories. This also applies to prestigious high-end aerospace products. The iconic images of the Juno launch vehicle and its Explorer satellite can serve as a good example. I would therefore like to begin this article with a [...]

The last of the giants: Airbus A-380

The small miniature scale of 1:144 and the experience of impressive size, which can only be handled with caution above the "airspace" of the workbench or squeezed into the limited room of an airbrush extraction cabin, do not [...]