1:24 Spitfire Mk.Vb

The Spitfire Mk.Vb and the year it carried the weight of the war

The Mk.Vb was the most numerous form of the Spitfire of all and from 1941 it made up the main strength of British fighter aviation. Against earlier machines it brought a pair of twenty millimeter cannon supplemented by machine guns, so a single well aimed hit did what a long burst had been needed for before. It was also the aircraft on which most of the foreign pilots in British service went into action.

Three machines on one sheet

The set offers three sets of markings. Two of the aircraft belonged to Polish squadrons and in 1943 carried the then standard European camouflage in Dark Green, Ocean Grey and Medium Sea Grey. The third option points elsewhere: it is a machine of No. 145 Squadron in the desert scheme of Dark Earth, Mid Stone and Azure Blue, that is in the colors of the North African theater, where the Spitfire found itself against German and Italian fighters over sand and salt flats.

Why it pays to choose between them

The contrast between the European and the desert version is tempting for a builder precisely because it is the same type of aircraft in two entirely different worlds. The gray green machine looks cool and inconspicuous, the sand colored one on the other hand glows and lends itself easily to work with chipped paint and dust. In a large scale, where every rivet and every layer of paint is visible, that difference stands out far more than on small models. The sheet is printed for 1:24 scale and is added to a kit of matching size.

A note on the build

With the desert version it is worth reckoning that sand quickly wore the paint away on the leading edges of the wings and around the intakes on the fuselage. The European machine, by contrast, takes a cleaner surface.