The wonderful folks at Minicraft Models deserve tremendous thanks for providing this review kit. I appreciate their work to bring new and unusual subjects to the scale modeling community. The IPMS/USA Reviewer Corps also deserves thanks for giving me the kit to review. I am only one member of a large staff in the Reviewer Corps, and I appreciate all the tireless team and individual work that goes into getting the material out to be reviewed and the finished write-ups published.

The Martin PBM-5A Mariner was a gull wing, twin-engine flying boat operated primarily by the U. S. Navy during WWII. The Mariner operated alongside its better known sister flying boat, the PBY Catalina. The PBM-5A was a tricycle amphibian, with prominent nose, dorsal and tail gun turrets, fixed wing floats, and twin tails. The Mariner had bomb bays nestled in the engine nacelles on the high wing and a distinctive dorsal radome just aft of the cockpit.

Mushroom Model Publication has released the second volume of the Hungarian Fighter Color series. You can find a review of volume 1 at http://web.ipmsusa3.org/content/hungarian-fighter-colours-1930-1945-vol…

The second volume continues the saga of authors Denes Bernad and Gyorgy Punka for what might become the definite reference books on the Hungarian Fighter Force during World War II.

This volume covers the Re.2000, Bf-109G, Fw-190F in extensive detail (each one of their chapters is over 40 pages long). Plus it has other shorter, but still well detailed chapters on the Me-110, Me-210, He-112, captured examples of PZL.11c, Avia B.534 IV and an indigenous design, the WM-23, which did not see combat but had exceptional performance for their time.

The name Macchi is often associated with flying boats and one of the reasons for that is the subject of Windsock Datafile No.162. The Macchi M.7 was one of the most successful biplane flying boat designs to come out of WWI and it enjoyed a phenomenally lengthy and active career from its introduction in 1918 well into the mid-1930s. Serving with other nations in the post-WWI years, examples of this speedy flying boat were also entered into Schneider Trophy races. Noted Italian aero historian and researcher Gregory Alegi presents the full story of this classic Italian Flying boat in this final Datafile for 2013.