History

Being that there is so much out there on the Bf-109, I will not take up any time with the history. The E variant was the first major upgrade of this airframe and was the main variant from the beginning of the war until mid-1941.

The Kit

This kit is made up of 3 sprues of grey injected plastic and 1 clear sprue. The parts are flash-free and have very fine detail. The only problem I had was the small parts (pitot tube, antenna mast, gun barrels, and counterweights) that have two attachment points on the sprue. It made it very difficult to remove these, and in the case of the mast...I broke it. That being said, I have to hand it to Airfix as their new tooled kits are fantastic. The decal sheet gives you markings for two aircraft – one Luftwaffe In desert cammo (black 8) from 1941 and one Royal Bulgarian aircraft from 1942. Since no swastika is provided and I had no spares, my choice was simple.

Modelers’ Guide to the P-38 Lightning is the third in a series of books published by Aero Research to aid modelers who want to build accurate models of specific aircraft. According to the first sentence in the book’s introduction: “This book is a guide to building any military variant of the P-38 Lightning, using existing kits.” That is not an understatement. The book will be a very useful reference for anyone planning to build any P-38. All variants, from prototype to the M model (and all photo-recon versions) are included. Author Jay Sherlock has done a thorough job of researching and organizing pertinent information that modelers usually find they need sometime during a project. As a matter of fact, the book will come in handy before starting the project – when deciding which kit to purchase. The first chapter describes in detail all kits currently available in 1/44, 1/72, 1/48 and 1/32 scales, and each description includes a small color photo of the box top.

One of ICM’s most recent offering is a set of PAG-14 Airfield plates used in the construction of airfields by the Soviet Union at home and in the Warsaw Pact nations. This particular set is for 1/48th scale. Knowing little of Soviet airfield construction – and what I did know centered on the use of hexagonal blocks for construction – I conducted online research into the PAG-14 plates. My first queries turned up a few photos, but then I found a research paper online — Naum Sapozhnikov and Raymond Rollings, Soviet Precast Pre-stressed Construction for Airfields, April 2007 — that shed a lot of light onto the use of these plates for airfield construction. Here is a little of the background from that paper.