MMP Books has released Vol 1 (more to come!) in their “Inside” series, entitled, “German Aircraft Instrument Panels”

Volume 1 features instrument faces and instrument panel illustrations for six Luftwaffe aircraft, those being the Bf-109F-4, Bf-110E, Fi-156 Storch, Fw-190A-3, Hs-123, and the Ju-88A-4. In North America, Casemate is the distributor for MMP.

There are two main features that make this book very useful to modelers. First, the entire instrument panel for each of the six aircraft featured is provided in full color. Secondly, every single instrument seen in the panel illustration is also shown in a separate drawing. These drawings are quite large and are close to “actual size” of the instrument face and bezel. As an example, the clock shows a time of 3:57:35. That’s 3:57 and 35 seconds. Yes, you can read the “seconds” hand! The color illustrations of the instrument faces and instrument panels are accompanied by some black & white images of the subject aircraft, and images of the cockpits. The text will take less than an hour to read, but the images will provide a remarkable resource that will last throughout the duration of a modeler’s interest in building a model of each of these six aircraft.

The detail offered by this MMP book will guide the modeler who wants to create a more accurate and highly detailed instrument panel than is offered by kit decals. And, of course, coming to mind immediately after realizing how this book would impact the quality of my model building, I also could see some scratch-built, scaled models of the instrument panels, themselves! How exciting!

See the book trailer at YouTube. The link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaxsrCIQq4E.

The artwork is superb, the accompanying text is clear and concise, and the black & white images are clean and sharp. It is an exciting and inviting publication that I highly recommend, and many Thanks go to Mushroom Models Publications for the opportunity to review it.