The Little World

I nearly passed this Dora Wings Westland Lysander by on the hobby shop shelf.

The problem was not the kitmaker – I have built a Dora Wings plane before and thought it was superb. The problem was the price – 100 times the cost of an Airfix kit I once built. But you have to remember it was an Airfix baggie and I bought it with pocket money in 1960. Prices have risen in the last 64 years…

The kit is all that one could want – crisp moulding, no flash, sensible gate sizes, and perfect clear parts. There is a resin part for the exhaust system and photo-etch brass for cowling flaps and cockpit parts. The decal sheet is perfect, and as I remember the last Dora Wings decals released and set easily.

I dived for my CANADIAN WARPLANES OF WWII book to see what the RCAF version looked like and found that the artist had concentrated on a target tug version – yellow with broad black stripes. Do-able, but not too attractive.

Harald Skaarup was better as he has a number of period shots of silver-doped Lysanders flying out of Ontario. It turns out that Canada produced a vast number of these aircraft for training and operations and supplied them to the RAF.

I have vet to decide whether to do an open or closed-wheel version, but the silver dope looks good. In any case the aircraft shows a lot of cockpit and a good deal of work will be inside there.