The Little World

I’m starting to appreciate scale model kits more and more these days – particularly the ones where someone makes an effort to put an interior into the makeup. I don’t want a Telford winner cockpit that takes me six months to glue and paint, but the fact that they give me the basics means I get to understand a lot more about the real aircraft.

And some of ’em need all the understanding they can get. My recent Special Hobby Brewster Buccaneer was a case in point and this Fairey is even more so.

Now the Fairey people made a classic aircraft in their Battle – classic if you consider that it flew until the Germans shot it down. It was too little, too late, and is largely unmourned. The Swordfish was better, if even older in design. It had the advantage of being used where there were few Luftwaffe fighters to splash it and had quite a success as a torpedo bomber. The Albacore was the next design, but it was chiefly an apology from Fairey to the FAA for making them fly open cockpits after perspex was discovered.

In the Barracuda, Fairey let themselves go big-time in the design and this time they buried the crew inside the aircraft so deeply that they needed to provide picture windows and a skylight for the observer and radioman. The pilot was a little better as they were forced to let him see a little way forward just to get off the flight deck.

I was expecting the Special Hobby modular construction of this deeply-buried design to be a nightmare. It needed to fit in so many places and with Special Hobby kits one of the places it doesn’t fit is in Prague… But I was pleasantly surprised. The sub-assemblies were pretty square and reasonably detailed just as injection parts. I put them all in with putty to see if the fuselage would close and in the end had only the slightest bit of fettling to do. The pilot’s control column broke off again in the midst of it but I’ll wait until just before I close up to pop another in there.

It is very nearly sleek from the upper view, but this elegance sort of peters out once you flip it over. I tested the bay windows and they’ll fit, but otherwise I’m counting on charm and quaintness to overcome most of the revulsion. At least the 1600 lb bomb is looking good. though the mounting point is the clumsiest part of the plane. That’s it in the middle of the green grid on the underside.