The Little World

Italeri are very wise kit makers when they include crew members for their aircraft. They and Airfix are two of the few who recognise that you can fill a cockpit with something rather than etched brass.

And the modeller will have less hassle and frustration all during the build.

My people-painting skills are non-existent. I never went in for the business of miniature painting, though I was always spraying a car or a plane. And I did not decry the use of crew for all the models – I just did not want to do them. When I was building a garden railway layout I bought big 1:22.5 Preiser figures that would have been masterpieces, but never got the courage up to start them.

However, Italeri crew are so nicely moulded and simple in shape that you can do them up in a couple of hours and not feel the pain. I think the trick is to do them before you get to the fuselage and wings and then you force yourself to finish the mains before you get the dessert. The simple interiors are sprayed and the details picked out if they will be viewed from the outside. Really, once the clear canopy is on and the clear windows PVA’d to the sides, you see very little anyway. But you know they are there – a crew of Zen aviators.

Spare time can also be put to good use on the engines. There are a lot of different specs for engines in the literature but my trip to the local Bull Creek RAAF Aviation Museum showed me that dirty brown with dry-brushed silver is darned near universal. Note the silver props with black rear faces – a clue to the history of this machine.

They might have been speaking Italian in the factory, but the people who flew it had a whole ‘nother set of languages to use in the air.