The Little World

If you go to any book on the Battle of Britain or any Google site that deals with the Heinkel bombers you will eventually see a shot of the crew inside the glass-nosed cockpit. It will have been taken from the bomb-aimer’s position looking backward at the pilot’s seats and will likely have been shot with a 35mm lens on either a Leica or Contax. The crews are uniformly dressed in their flying suits and helmets and look either brave and resolute or cheerfully unaware.

As the Airfix Heinkel kit nose is built up of a number of clear styrene plates, there comes a point in their assembly when you can poke a macro lens in the unfinished nose and replicate the crew photo.

I wish I was a better figure painter in this small scale – and that is a cue to attend a course on the subject at the next model exhibition and learn what to do. The figures themselves are getting better and better – driven, I suppose, by the military miniature 25mm figure scene. Fortunately most air kits are hard plastic so the figures might be brought to some degree of realism.