As with most fighter aircraft, they tend to get heavier as the user needs more capability than the original design can deliver. In this case, the light weight G.91 needed more range, loiter time and weapons. Enter the G.91Y. Going from a single engine to two engines, the G.91Y nearly doubled its empty and max take off weights while increasing range and navigational capabilities. External ordinance capacity increased from 1000lbs to 4000lbs. Like its predecessor, the G.91Y also competed against some of what the world had to offer in 1965 but in the end only the Italian Air Force used this aircraft. The “Yankee” version of the G.91 would serve from 1966 to 1995.

Richard Marmo’s latest installment in his “The Marmo Method Model Building Guide” series is booklet # 14, Building The 1/96 Scale Atlantis Moon Ship.   These booklets are a great reference for scale modelers of any experience level.  I would like to thank Mr. Marmo and Scale Publications for providing a copy for this review.

Revell released the XSL-01, 3-stage rocket kit in 1957 and later in the same year, released just the 3^rd stage, the Moon Ship as a stand-alone kit.  Both were highly successful kits of the day.  In 2021, Atlantis re-released the Moon Ship under their brand but it’s the same tooling and kit as the 1957 version.

In October of 2021, Mr. Marmo published this booklet to describe the materials, tools and techniques he used as he went through the processes of building, finishing and displaying the Atlantis kit.

On May 1, 1960, an ex-USAF turned CIA pilot named Francis Gary Powers flying a Lockheed U-2 at 70,000 feet 800 miles east of Moscow felt and saw the results of a Soviet SA-2 missile removing the tail of his aircraft. Thus ended the first round of U-2 overflights over the Soviet Union and the time frame covered in this volume. Despite the international incident that resulted, the information gained about the state of Soviet bomber and nuclear weapon capabilities more than justified the risks taken. The author, Kevin Wright is a university professor specializing in the Cold War. This book outlines the first phase of U-2 operations from 1956 to 1960. The book opens with a brief history of how the U-2 came to be and examines the various equipment packages that the aircraft could carry. Contrary to the public perception of the U-2 only being a camera platform, it carried nuclear fallout sampling equipment as well as receivers for the collecting electronic intelligence.

Volume 2 of the Medal of Honor series documents the 6 aviators who earned the Medal of Honor during the interwar years 19191939. This book of 80 pages has 215 photos and color profiles of 10 aircraft relating to this period.

Only 1 of the 6-aviation related Medal of Honor awarded in this period was for action that involved combat by USMC Lieutenant Christian Frank Schilt in Nicaragua in 1928. 3 of the other 5 men awarded the Medal of Honor were presented for exploration including Admiral Byrd (North Pole flight) and the other 2 awarded were for lifesaving efforts.

It is very interesting that Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr received the army designed Medal of Honor for his solo flight across the Atlantic 20-21 May 1927 even though he was no longer on active US Army duty. Authorized by a special act of Congress in December 1927 Lindbergh was presented the medal by President Coolidge in 1929.

This book is from their Orange Series that specializes in particular aircraft types, in this case the Gloster Javelin. There are 208 pages of mixed text, photos, line drawings, charts and tables of info about the aircraft starting with a rather detailed recounting of the conception and initial design of the aircraft and how that design evolved into the final version. It then goes on to discuss the various armaments it carried, including the air-to-air missiles which also includes a brief run down on how the Firestreak missile was developed. Next is a mark-by-mark description of every variant of the aircraft with many illustrations to show the differences. Included in this chapter is a rather detailed technical description of all the various systems in the aircraft, such as landing gear, electrical and hydraulic systems, 12 annotated photos of various marks’ cockpits and cutaway photos, diagrams, line drawing and charts about the engines.