The Little World

Lieutenant Yuen* has command of his aircraft. He’s joined the 15th Squadron flying Henschel dive bombers. Let’s hope he is successful.

Lt. Yuen was a bit of a handful to sandwich into the cockpit. I had originally thought to follow normal practice and finish the fuselage before cementing the pilot in. Not on the Hs 123A-1. The coaming is so tight around the pilot that if a kit doesn’t provide opening coaming doors you ain’t going to get him in afterwards. He better be brave because no matter what happens to this ship, he’s going down with it.

But apart from the gallows humour, all praise to Airfix all these years for including crew. So many of the other makers do not – and the failure to do so is a bit inexplicable.

The short run operators will nearly always make a cockpit that fits funny, but if you have a sense of humour and some epoxy you can laugh your way out of it. They sometimes go to enormous expense to add resin and photo-etch brass frets to the kit when all they would need to do is make one resin or injected pilot to fill the seat. The dodgy little brass seat belts could be left out and people could learn new skills as figure painters.

Even if you had no ambitions in that line, you could spray the pilot black and glue him in anyway as a way of showing the scale of the aircraft. More ambitious people like me can make a passable pilot figure with 4 paint colours; khaki, flesh, brown, and silver. Substitute mid-blue or green for the khaki and you have nearly any air force. If you’re doing USAAF or Luftwaffe just paint the jacket in the leather colour as well and all bases are covered.

Gunners as well – they do not really have to be gripping a machine gun trigger – just add another pilot figure on the sprue tree and he’ll look fine under a turret canopy.

As far as face colours you only need two; a pink flesh and a mid brown. If it is an open cockpit you can blotch up the pilot with oil spots and it could be anyone.

• Named after my old class-mate, Allan Yuen. Anyone who knows Allan gets the joke…