1:32 Avro Lancaster B.I

A bomber that got younger according to its lettering

Serial number LM220 belonged to one of those machines where the lettering on the nose came about as a crew joke. It said the aircraft was getting younger by the day, which on a four engine bomber at the close of the war is a message more than ironic. The individual letter Y and the fuselage codes WS placed it with No. 9 Squadron, which was then operating from the airfield at Bardney near Lincoln.

1944 was the peak year for British night operations. Takeoff was at dusk, the formation gathered over the North Sea and over the target minutes decided everything. Machines like this one came back with torn covering and still went up again the next day, so patches and new mission counts were layered onto them. The airfield itself was a typical wartime makeshift: concrete runways, sheet metal huts and dispersal stands scattered among the fields, between which taxiing before takeoff took long minutes.

The symmetry of the codes decides

The large letters on the sides of the fuselage give away every inaccuracy. Measure the distance from the same fixed point on both sides of the model, for example from the edge of the rear bomb bay bulkhead, and only then lay the first letter down to that measure. Codes placed asymmetrically are more disturbing than a missing piece of small lettering, and on a large model even a layman sees them. Once dry, look at the model from behind at eye level; a deviation of a few tenths of a millimeter is most visible from precisely that position.

The package covers one fuselage; the plastic subject and paints are obtained by the modeler by his own route.