Category: Civil aircraft
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De Havilland Heron Mk II – Part One – Raised Expectations

And raised rivets, too. I had a happy childhood, and a great many of the happy occasions revolved around model kits. This included a number of the 1950’s and 60’s Airfix products. Merit, Monogram, Aurora, and Revell as well. So it’s with great delight that I see Airfix re-issue classic models from the era. I…
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Beechcraft Model 18 – Part Four – Spirit Of Lodgepole

CF-ACL is ready for service. The Spirit of Lodgepole is named after a small town in the Pembina that serves the oil industry and was once the main service town for the Brazeau Dam project. It had an RCMP post, a hotel, a school, and a general store, as well as repair shops for the…
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Fokker F-27 Friendship – Part Four – More Planning Needed

Relax, folks..all is going well. But I cannot help but think that it could have gone well more easily. I am not a patient man with puzzles. I can stand about 15 minutes of a jigsaw before I go out looking for strong drink. I do not read mysteries. I should have set fire to…
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Miles Magister – Part One – Cute And Clean

Every so often you need to have a change from heavily-armed warplanes or state-of-the-art jets. You need something small and simple and bright. You need a trainer. Of course the real things were all this and more and perfectly able to kill instructors and students who made mistakes…but that is not what I am intending…
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RCAF Avro Lancaster – Part Eight – The Why And Wherefore

Finishing the Avro Lancaster in RCAF rescue colours has called up a series of questions about it as a real aircraft. I’ve no idea whether my answers are correct, but here goes anyway… a. Why did the RCAF have Lancasters? Because they were part of Bomber Command in the UK in the second world war.…
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RCAF Avro Lancaster – Part One – The Second Lucky Chance

Well, you get lucky sometimes. I got lucky lots of times in practice – not so many in my second career. But one of the memorable ones in 2014 was a trip to Japan as a corporate guest. We were hauled around but occasionally let loose in the shops or cafes to give the tour…
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What Is A Senior Model? Part One.

And don’t get funny with the Mick Jagger or Keith Richards jokes…I mean scale models. What do people over 60 want in a scale model kit, and how can they get it? I can speak for myself as I passed that mark twelve years ago, but I am hesitant to decide for others. However, I…
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Grim Reality Vs Grim Fantasy

I am often puzzled at the selection of model kits on the shelves of my local hobby dealers. They’re good dealers and I love them dearly – just as I love the dealers in the eastern states when I visit them. Every one is different but they all have a certain feel to them that…
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Boeing B-17 – Part Four – Bombing A Different Enemy

As soon as I asked Google to show me B-17’s in Canada I got all the old RCAF pictures I had already seen, plus lots of USAAF shots. And then down at the bottom of a long search something new started to pop up. The civilian B-17. A few had been converted to private planes…
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Good Morning, Staff.

Good morning. You may be wondering why I have called you here today. The first thing was to trial the ability of Photoshop to make focus stacking images automatically – a task which it has performed admirably. There are a few errors in the image taken of you but they can be largely overlooked. The…
