The Little World

A notable milestone; my first Lebanese aircraft. All courtesy of a colour photo taken sometime during 1949 of an S.79 taxiing out to a runway past a pair of contemporary piston-engined fighter planes of the Lebanese Air Force. That, and a couple more found lurking on the net of similar aircraft in the middle East.

The fact that the Lebs left the gun positions open as they took off is a blessing – all the later pictures closed them or faired over the position for a transport. The Italeri kit depicts the S.79 as a WWII torpedo bomber so there are guns all over it.

I was also encouraged to see other people who had done much the same build, though many of them probably had the assistance of dedicated decal sheets for this. I was reduced to making my own:

Down to my last sheet of Testor’s decal paper in a market that has seen the supply dry up ( ! ) and the printer started to play up…I was lucky to get enough roundels and letters out of this to do the job. In the end the side flashes were a failure in the printing and I ended up hand-painting them.

But it came out well in the end.

And you can be seated in Economy Class, Business Class, or Machine Gun Class…

Note: If modern day airlines offered an option of travelling in a gun turret and taking the occasional pot shots at other airliners it would be a sell-out. Hell with the free drinks and bags of peanuts…