The Little World

And if you occasionally collapse onto the airfield in a welter of tin tubes and screaming passengers…well, that’s British engineering.

Also French and Russian aero design. For people too cheap to build proper airports with runways, they seem to have had a propensity for iffy landing gear. Thin legs splayed at impossible angles guyed up with even thinner struts. Axles that would be hard-pressed to support a kiddie car. Thin tyres on thin rims. Who pinched the dolly pram wheels, then.

I’ll give them credit for learning – by the time the Lancaster and Mosquito came along they had decided that twin-leg gear and a decent tyre might be a good idea. They didn’t quite get it sorted out in time to land Seafires twice on the same gear, but that’s naval aviation for you. They invented the angled deck and the scrap dealer’s yard for a very good reason…

As modellers we are forced to follow suit and try to construct a workable set of legs from material that has less structural strength than the original metal. The millionaires who can afford to buy white metal or brass landing gear legs for their plastic kits are lucky – they will not collapse on the display shelf, though there is still the problem of fastening the leg to the wing. The rest of us either have to incorporate helper wire supports or just watch the legs slowly bend and bow.

Or chicken out. There’s a reason The Douglas Boston of the RCAF is sitting on the plinth with spinning propellers; I built a similar kit of a Havoc on the ground and the Czech landing gear is all but moribund. Rest of the plane is fine, but don’t look too closely at how it is sitting.