English Electric Lightning Ejection seat, Exhausts, and Wheel Wells

Published: October 13, 2010
Company: Aires Hobby Models

The first thing: Thanks once again to AIRES for providing IPMS/USA with these remarkable detail items! Your support is most welcome… we truly appreciate it!

I first saw a Lightning at RAF Mildenhall’s Air Fete 1984. I had been on station for less than a month, and was in modelers’s heaven, Canon AE-1 in hand. USAFE was a true force with fighters everywhere, and the RAF was present in a big way at this, the show of shows. The Hurricane, “Last of the Many”, F-4’s with the new wraparound Euro 2 Paint scheme,… And there, on the display line, was a Lightning. The original “Scalded cat out of the woods” fighter, which could outclimb an F-15 for at least a while after a brakes-on takeoff. Words fail how cool it was… and today I don’t think I truly appreciated how good… more

F-102A Delta Dagger

Published: September 24, 2010
Company: Encore by Squadron

Back in the late 1980’s, I was stationed at Sembach in Germany. Having left England behind in 1986 due to reassignment, the word on aircraft modeling was mostly about what Revell and Italeri were up to. Everything in the shops was Revell or R/C related, and my only link to what was happening in the rest of the static scale world involved the Squadron shop flyers. A friend from Miami sent me a letter saying “sign up for the “Golden Eagle Society” newsletter… the word here is there are going to be 1/48 PBY’s, F-89’s and F-102’s from a major manufacturer…” I signed up, saw the newsletter, and was thinking to myself, “Yeah, right”. But at the same time I had high hopes; we had, in the space of a few years since 1982, seen the F-106 from Monogram, along with the consummate A-10, A-37, and… more