Special Hobby EN

   Very glad to have the following good news for you, the long time sold-out 1/72  SN72002 U Boot IIA and   SH72330 Letov Š.328v plus the 1/48  SH48138   Supermarine Seafire Mk.III Aéronavale & Irish service have been made available again.   And our team of skillful toolmakers are finishing the 1/48 T-2 Buckeye clear canopy mould. And as this canopy is designed to be posed open, the part needs to be positioned at 30 degrees in the tooling - so a really huge piece of metal indeed!

The AH-1G variety of the Cobra became famous because of its service in the Vietnam War. The later version designated AH-1Q and S, very fortunately, did not get as much famous. Why? These TOW armed Q and S Cobras were designed specially to defend the Free World against Warsaw Pact's tank columns that, in the plans and dreams of communist military plan makers were supposed to roll towards the Rhine and perhaps even further to the Atlantic. On the other side of the frontier, by the airmen often called the High Blue Wall, in the free world, these columns were rather a huge nightmare and so the development of a specialised version of the highly successful Cobra chopper was initiated. The Q/S Cobras, when in operational service, were stationed at West Germany bases alongside the border. And among them, also this one as shown in today's photos, airframe no 72-021024 operating from Hanau base in the 1970s.    The markings of this machine, with a few more, are contained in our  SH48232

   Martin Pfeifer is back again with his  SH48220 J-3 Cub model depicting one of the very first Cub airframes to have served with the US military. During the large scale military exercises held in 1940, the Army borrowed (while the air force rejected the offered J-3s) a few yellow-overall machines from the Piper flying school, Their striking livery was hidden beneath newly applied Olive Drab distemper. The artillery control and short range reconnaissance test flights turned out more then well and so the Cub had their way to the military open, resulting in large number orders for the L4 Grasshopper military version.    Along with the mentioned history, these first ex-civilian Cubs are also interesting for their distemper camouflage scheme as due to the intensity of their service with the military, the olive got off the airframe rather quickly, leaving uneven patches of the original Yellow. And even this is portrayed nicely on Martin's model. And allow us also to mention a few sets

   I bet the majority of modellers will have  thought of the French low-wing monoplane Dewoitine 510, if one mentions those three digits in the title. Well, they are right of course, but there was yet one more French fighter aeroplane at that time with the same designation, the Spad 510. Also of an all-metal construction, but with a pair of wings, and a contemporary to our own Avia B.534 biplane fighter.  This French biplane prouded itself with a famous factory name (or rather an abbreviation) SPAD and became the very last combat biplane of the Armée de l'Air. It served long enough to see action in WW2 and flew with the territorial defence units as well as with training units. A few of both Czech and Polish pilots also flew and fought at the controls of the Spad.    The 1/72 scale kit sets of the Spad 510 were manufactured by Special Hobby team for our partners at Azur/From of France and there are two boxings available,   FR0049 a FR0050 . And it is the latter one which contains t