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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?
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: [...]
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 [...]
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 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 [...]
It is hard to believe that such a conventional-looking aircraft as the Miles Magister came out of an aircraft factory that was virtually famous for unconventionally designed aircraft and novel concepts! Even if Miles Aircraft was not [...]
Coincidences, especially chance encounters, are a popular literary topos to start great stories. The already legendary story of the Fw 200 Condor can also boast such an incident: in March 1936, Dr Kurt Tank, who had recently become head of [...]
Do you know this too? Sometimes kits contain whole jewels of modelling, such as a wonderfully reproduced radio equipment, a detailed navigator's workstation or a promisingly detailed engine, which then in the further building process are [...]
