Category: camouflage
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Stealth Aircraft – Part Two – Painting The No-See-Um
I’ll bet you’re just itching to know what a No-See-Um bite feels like… The colours of the F 117 and the B2 are quite different, though in both cases the paint is part of the circus trick. The night attack aircraft is very dark grey/black and the strategic bomber nearly as dark, but with gradation…
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RCAF Wellington Mk II – Part Five – Night Black
The RAF night bomber scheme is a grim sort of design. Well I guess flying 300 miles in the dark, amongst a thousand other flying bomb dumps, and through radar-directed flak is a pretty grim business anyway. With a German Chancellor at one end and Arthur Harris at the other it seems like a murderous…
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Finnish Brewster Buffalo – Part Two – All In A Day’s Play
I have given up days of work. Now I slave away at a hobby… it is much more trouble… And I should not have it otherwise. I can remember employment and practice and professional education and have no desire whatsoever to go back and re-commence them. If I had to do it all over again,…
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Short Stirling Mk IV – Part Three – V3 To Canada
A very specific aircraft on a very specific mission. And no bombs carried. This Short Stirling was flown from the UK to Canada in the 40’s as a training aircraft to familiarise the trainees of the BCATP with the then-new H2S ground-view radar. You’ll see the characteristic H2S streamlined dome under the rear portion of…
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Short Stirling Mk IV – Part Two – The Experiment
Suggested by an illustration. The WW2 bomber in standard British night bomber colour scheme is a three-coloured beast – coal black undersides and green/brown upper surfaces. But as seen on the Stirling, the black extends a long way up slab sides – and the Stirling has lots of slab to it. The top bit is…
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Potez 63-11 – Part Four – The Fishbowl Of Sadness
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…
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Koolhoven Fk 58 – Part Four – Quick Change Artist
Sharp-eyed readers will notice something unusual about this small Dutch fighter of 1939. It is undressing… Or rather, it is caught in between one set of colours and another. The real planes were delivered to the French air force from the Rotterdam plant of Koolhoven just prior to war with the diplomatic ruse of painting…
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Consolidated B-24 D – Part Five – Unloved 23790
I am not going to assign a position to Unloved in the various waves of USAAF bombers that hit Ploesti in Romania. There are scholarly books that can report on every ship and crew that made the raid. I am just satisfied that it has most of the salient features of that early B-24 model…
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Consolidated B-24 D – Part Four – If It Was Any Uglier
It could stand for Parliament in a Queensland marginal seat… As it is, the basic airframe is a beauty – straight and true and that with very little filling or fettling. The wings slipped into a recess in the fuselage sides so that the cement joint was completely hidden. I am a nervous modeller and…
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Well, Hello Masking Fluid
Goodbye putty worms. My Facebook feed has just put up a reel of the world’s only flying Avro Anson Mk I in preparation for take-off. The shot is of the starboard wing, engine, and nose. The colour scheme is the standard RAF Dark Earth and Dark Green. And all the colour edges are sharp lines.…
The Little World 