The Little World

I’m being unfair to Bellanca – I could have chosen Beechcraft or Bristol. The alliteration was the thing – a ” B ” aircraft maker was needed.

Let’s start out by saying there never was an aircraft called the Ball-Ache. There may have been many that induced the condition, but that is a matter for the pilots and maintenance crews to discuss. I am dealing with scale models here.

The Ball-Ache or B/A is the kit that appears in the history of an air force or airline but does not rate highly enough to be considered by a major maker of plastic kits. This is not necessarily an insurmountable barrier – it may be that it can form a steady seller for the limited-run makers in Czechoslovakia. They might turn out a pretty smart little kit of it – of course there will be no cockpit location tabs and the two halves of the fuselage will have been formed by two different people on two different days…but at least there will be an injection kit.

The real Ball-Ache is the plane that is so obscure or unappetising that even the Czechs turn up their noses at it. It finally devolves to a vac-form garage builder who seeks to spread the misery he experiences to others in the form of lumpy white plastic sheets. If he is successful, enough of the kits are sent out in plastic bags to enough careless enthusiasts to make an anomaly in the suicide statistics for the year.

The same may be said about the resin-moulded kit, but resin kits can come a lot closer to being good than vac-forms can. Many of them get built – not just put into the closet and forgotten.

I’ll amend that – like a member of the British royal family or a Hollywood panderer, no-one who buys a vac-form kit ever really feels that they are safe from public scrutiny and condemnation. They know they’ve done it and they look round to see if other people find out.