The Little World

I refer to this rather sleek French aircraft in this way as it was witness to the failures of its own armies in the spring of 1940 – from an elegant vantage point.

The design is deliberately biased toward the primary mission – reconnaissance – with the pilot up above like a hansom cab driver and a vast nose of plexiglass to let the observer see all sides. It must have been discouraging to watch the panzers roll West.

The design has a gunner in the dorsal position but also seems to mount machine guns in a blind tail and ventral position. Bomber variants were made with a lot more barrels poking out forward.

The scheme is a direct copy of the kit call-out and is nicer than the LeO previously built. The experiment of mixing hard and soft demarcations is not as successful as I thought it would be, but the technique is still in early days. The old Czech decals went down very well over a gloss coat.

The landing gear is surprisingly sturdy for such a complex design. Numerous resin mudguards were needed but if you built them up a layer at a time eventually the complexity looked quite nice. The PE accessories were largely ignored as too small for sensible inclusion. This model will go on show at venues away from my studio so it has to be able to stand a modicum of handling.