1:48 Fieseler Fi 156C Storch

The second life of an aircraft with a short takeoff run

The Fieseler Fi 156C could take off from a distance shorter than the one from a soccer goal line to the penalty spot, and land almost on the spot. That is exactly why after 1945 it came in useful everywhere airfields were lacking: it carried mail, served ambulance and liaison purposes and flew long after the combat types of its generation had been scrapped. This sheet follows its postwar course in Poland.

Six machines, fifteen years of service

• the aircraft with the marking ZKR of the 9th independent liaison flight, 1948
• the machine marked with the letter R and the number 5505 of the same unit
• the aircraft with the number 37 and the inventory number 1009, the turn of 1948 and 1949
• the civil registration SP-ARK of 1951
• the machine SP-GLD of the aeronautical institute in Warsaw, the years 1954 to 1959
• the civil SP-BAS of 1954

The set thereby covers fifteen years of one aircraft in two entirely different roles — military as well as civil — and will offer a modeler a way to build a machine that will not meet ten others just like it side by side at a show.

Masks as part of it

Besides the print the envelope also holds masks for the canopy glazing, which with this type matters: the glazed cockpit has a great number of small frames and masking them by hand takes more time than all the rest of the build.

A collector who wants a machine from the military and from the civil era side by side will manage with one envelope and split the print between two models.