The Little World

Are the colourful liveries spoiling us?

If you are a scale hot rod or custom car builder, just quit reading now. This column has nothing to tell you.

If you are an armour person, you can also go make a dark brown cup of coffee with flakes of rust in it.

If you are an aircraft builder, you are now at the customs barrier. Have you anything to declare? Are you carrying baggage from your youth, or is your youth following close behind? Have you given in to the kit makers whose decal sheets look like a carnival float? Are all your planes commemoratives? Are you half-blind with violent colour?

It was not always thus, though there was a long history of off-colour jokes told by the model kit makers in the 1950’s. The Aurora Famous Fighters saw yellow Mitsubishi Zeros and metallic red Messerschmitt Bf 109’s. Soviet aircraft were vile green. We had no choice but to build them and accept the spectrum as it was presented.

AIrfix corrected a lot of this for 50’s kids. They, and Humbrol, presented believable schemes and workable paints. The Humbrol tins may have been thick and glossy, but their RAF green and brown was distinguishable from their Luftwaffe green and black. If you had a new brush and were prepared to squint as you painted, you could come out with a 105% authentic airplane…

But starting with Matchbox ( two or three colours to their plastic ) and continuing through more modern makers, the tendency is to make either a dusty mystery or a My Little Pony of standard aircraft. Any commemorative or squadron paint job is seized upon to give excuse for a re-boxing, even if it is extremely short-lived or ugly as sin.

And no-one is at all surprised by USAAF assembly ships or German WW1 flying circus colours.

I find I have to throttle back when looking at prospective paint schemes, lest I start to have an air force that is commanded by the Ringling Brothers.