1:48 Lysander III

A machine that landed in meadows

The Westland Lysander was a British aircraft for cooperation with the ground forces: a high-set wing with automatic leading-edge slats, fixed landing gear with massive wheel fairings and the ability to come down on a strip a few hundred meters long. It was precisely that quality that won it a second career, which today is remembered more than artillery observation. The Mk III version in a black finish carried Allied agents on moonlit nights to improvised strips in occupied France.

Glazing like a glass tower

The cockpit of this type is not a pilot's canopy in the usual sense. It is a tall glazed structure that begins at the windscreen and ends only behind the observer's position. The rear part slides and at the sides the windows continue deep toward the trailing edge of the wing. There are considerably more frames here than on any single-seat fighter of the same scale and they are narrow, so masking tape applied by hand puckers on the curves and the finish bleeds under a lifted corner.

Set contents

• two sets of masks for the canopy, separately for the outer and separately for the inner side of the parts
• two sets of national insignia masks for spraying the roundels straight onto the surface

The inner masks have particular weight on this machine. The glazed area is so large that the cockpit is visible from the side and from above, and a frame painted only from the outside gives itself away at first glance. The film is self-adhesive and lifts off without adhesive residue, cut to the particular shape of the part, so it is laid into the corners of the frame and no trimming is done on the model.