The Little World

I’m clean. And socially isolated. And I want to remain this way for at least five minutes…

There probably never was a clean Coastal Command Wellington. Or Liberator, Sunderland, Digby, Whitley, or Hudson…or anything else that started life as white on the underside. Think about it. Underneath is where things run to when they leak, like oil, hydraulic fluid, or sea water. Underneath is where dirt from landing strips flies up and accumulates. The real Coastal Command definition of white must have looked like a restroom roller towel.

But I am running a 1:72 air museum and apart from the fingerprints of pesky tourists there should be few other factors to mark up the underside of the bombers. So I get to make clean ones. When I get the bug to weather my models you can expect the worst for a while and then a sensible compromise. But not today.

The Wellington Mk1C is built exactly as it was out of the box – no substitutions. It is fairly well what the box art showed. I’m happy with that. The next Wellington can be from the RCAF ” Snowy Owl ” squadron in the Middle East if I can find the appropriate engine nacelles and scoops. I’ll see if the new Airfix kit will lend itself to the subterfuge. I suspect it will be a whole level above this Italeri/MPM model as far as engineering and precision but I can’t say I’m disappointed with this one for the price.

The only cavil I have is the lack of any geodesic framework in the starboard nose window and that’s largely down to me forgetting to paint some in before ai closed the fuselage. I also suspect that the rear waist windows were open in most of the CC Wellingtons and had I not been lazy I would have opened and glazed them. Certainly Italeri provided a spare pair of .30 cal machine guns for the positions.

Now, Italeri/MPM/Special Hobby/ whoever…a task and a challenge.

Make me a set of 1:72 aircrew – pilots, bombardiers, radiomen, observers, gunners…make them either specific or generic but make them in boxes of 24 or 48. We need to populate our planes. We’ll pay for good figures and they can be resin to save money. But give us the aircrew!