The Kit

Academy provides you with six sprues of light grey plastic and two small clear plastic. The sprues are the same ones that were issued by Hobbycraft, but there is a difference. The difference is the inclusion of three additional items, two cowl guns and a pitot tube made out of turned brass. These items are little gems of work. The guns have hollowed out ends and look perfect. The decals are printed by Cartograf and provide markings for one colorful aircraft. Being from Cartograf they are in perfect register and suitably thin. In essence, perfect decals.

The instructions are easy enough to understand and broken down into twelve steps. The marking option provides a four view drawing that will help you mark your airplane.

The Aircraft

The post World War II airliner market was rather like the competition between bomber aircraft in the war. Better engines, sleeker designs, more load carrying capability, longer range, were all sought after by the various airline companies both in the US and overseas. TWA bought the Lockheed Constellation, which could carry about 100 passengers on transatlantic flights. Pan American, the other US powerhouse airline bought "Connies", but they also had a long standing relationship with Douglas Aircraft. The Douglas DC-7 could fly New York to LA nonstop, but couldn’t do the Atlantic. The DC-7C could fly the Atlantic nonstop.

Unfortunately for the Connie and the DC-7, the Boeing 707, Douglas DC-8, Convair 880, and the VC-10 were coming into service, and the DC-7C began to disappear.

Airfix. This iconic manufacturer that has come and gone, and returned throughout the years; they have returned under the support of Hornby, a well-established, forward thinking company, delivering what can only be described as world class kits. Reasonably priced, detailed far better than the old days, and coming back with models we have asked for; In this case, we have yet another example of what Airfix/Hornby can do; the Valiant! I have walked around underneath the surviving Valiant back in 1984 when visiting IWM Hendon, and it is a lot bigger than it looks in model form!

Considered by many to be the finest piston-engined fighter aircraft ever to take to the skies, the P-51 Mustang is legendary among aviation aficionados and modelers alike, and needs little introduction in this “first look” at Tamiya’s exquisite rendition of the defining Mustang variant, the P-51D.

Riding on the tremendous popularity of its 1/32 Scale Aircraft series thus far, Tamiya once again ups the ante with the introduction of the P-51 series. As with their Zeros, Phantoms, and Spitfires, Tamiya has clearly engineered their tooling to crank out Mustang variants other than just the “-D.”

“Die Erzählung des Schwarzen Ritters”, translated as The Story of the Black Knights, is a popular comic book series set in WWII. The series follows Oberleutnant Ernst von Bauer and his 8^th Tank Company known as the Black Knights. The series begins in the fall of 1943 on the Eastern Front, and follows the unit through the end of the war as they change vehicles several times (the unit uses Panthers, Panzer IVs, StuG IIIs, and even Jadgpanzers). The Panther A enters the story early on, after the unit loses their Panzer IV’s in a battle with the Soviets. By luck, they find several Panther A’s and fight back, repelling the “Reds”.