Scratchbuilt Vance "Flying Wing" - 1/72nd

The Vance "Flying Wing", a brainchild of pilot Claire Vance that was built at the onset of the 30's- stands out proudly when compared to its clunky biplane contemporaries, making them look slow and cumbersome in comparison.

Scratchbuilding helps you exercise the modeling muscles, and the methods and materials employed can be queried in the step-by-step building post:

https://wingsofintent.blogspot.com/2022/04/scratchbuilt-vance-flying-wing-172nd.html

Like many (ad)Vance(d) designs that in spite of their inherent merit suffered bad luck, the Vance Flying Wing could never demonstrate its potential, although it repeatedly flew, in various hands, from one place to the next, but seemingly only to drop from races, record flights, publicity flights and so on. It changed appearance -and some times its name- as frequently as it changed hands, as Claire Vance died soon after building it, and then it went through several owners and ended up in the midst of a legal dispute between some of them. The bad luck of this plane perhaps slowed down aviation progress, but aviation history gave us the many configurations and schemes of this elegant plane. I have chosen for this model the appearance the original had while attempting to participate in the 1932 Bendix race with number 61. As mentioned in the building article, the plane can be seen throughout its life with a dual or single horizontal tail, long and short cowls, semi-open or totally enclosed cockpit, one or two seats in the cockpit, and various canopy shapes.

I have wanted to build this one for a long time, and the decal set from Arctic Decals in Finland made it now possible, thanks!

Streamlined, refined and good-looking, the Vance "flying wing" conveys a feeling of efficiency and speed, even if its potential could not be fully realized, but it surely makes for a very handsome model!

 

Curtiss Jenny barnstormer- Olimp from Ukraine 1/72nd - Lillian Boyer

 

 

A contemporary card:

A wonderful little kit from Olimp in Ukraine. The Curtiss Jenny is so famous that hardly needs any introduction. Olimp's rendition is absolutely charming, a pleasure to work with, and has a nice level of detail. They released different boxings to cover a number of sub-types, but they seem to be mostly sold out now. In fact, several fellow modelers wrote to tell me that they have this kit, so it seemed to have sold well.

The step-by-step building article is here, perhaps useful to read if you have the kit, as it needs a couple of touches.

https://wingsofintent.blogspot.com/2022/03/civil-curtiss-jenny-olimp-models-from.html

This was such a pleasant build, the plastic is fantastic, the fit good, the parts very easily removed from the sprues and promptly cleaned up, and you get some spares as several versions are included in the trees. How I wish that the rule for short-run kits were something like this. Such pity that Olimp didn't seem to pursue the injected plastic market and concentrated on resin.

Lillian Boyer's plane was chosen as the subject for this build, in the common post WWI war role of barnstormer. You can see clips of her hair-raising stunts in the building article following the link given above.

My thanks to friend and fellow unmodeler Christos Psarras and his unsinkable dogs, Coochie and Smoochee, for providing the decals for this project.

And since we are in the Ukraine subject, let's hope that the grip of the despicable wannabe dictator -pals with the orange ignorant clown we had here- is released from this country, so its people can continue to live free and in peace.

Practicing the routine on land with the pilot: