My thanks to Eduard for furnishing this photo-etch set for review and IPMS for allowing me to do it.

The Avro Lancaster of World War II fame can trace its linage back to the twin-engine Avro Manchester. The Manchester saw a lot of action in the early months of World War II. However, it was underpowered and generally did not meet RAF expectations. Using the Manchester as a starting point the Avro engineers increased the wing span, replaced the two Rolls-Royce X-24 Vultures with four Rolls-Royce V-12 Merlins, lengthened the fuselage and redesigned the tail. The results was a bomber with impressive performance and excellent flying characteristics. Its top speed was 282mph at 63,000 lbs. and its landing speed was 95-100mph using the old split flap design set to full down.

Background

Platz, out of Japan, has been involved in the 1/144th modeling community for a while. They have produced many of their own kits and have teamed up with another Japanese company called F-Toys. F-Toys produce various subjects, among them being 1/144th scale aircraft kits. These kits from F-Toys are typically pre-painted, mostly assembled, and somewhat snap together. Many 1/144th scale modelers will take these pre-painted F-Toys kits strip them down, add details, repaint, and decal them. However, now we are seeing Platz take those same F-Toys kits and produce them as traditional model kits. This Mitsubishi MU-2 is a prime example of that venture; first, it was released under the F-Toys name as a pre-painted kit, and now it’s released as a traditional model kit.

History

As there is enough on the history of this aircraft either in print or on the internet I will not go into it here. Suffice to say that the Hellcat is the most successful carrier based aircraft in history as 12,275 were built, 270 were lost and Hellcat pilots claimed 5156 kills in less than two years of ops.