1:72 Vickers Viking 1B (Argentina, France)

A postwar airliner with bomber roots

The Vickers VC.1 Viking first flew on June 22, 1945 and was among the first British transport machines to reach production after the war. The designers did not start from nothing: they took the wing, the landing gear and the tail surfaces from the Wellington bomber and added an entirely new cigar-shaped fuselage for passengers. A pair of Bristol Hercules radial engines provided the power.

What sets the 1B series apart

Compared with the earlier series, the 1B version received a lengthened fuselage and took up to twenty-seven passengers. Over one hundred sixty Vikings were built in all and a considerable number of them went to foreign operators, among them Argentina and France, and it is exactly their machines that this box covers. Military derivatives, the Valetta and the Varsity, later grew out of the airframe, so the family went on flying long after the civil Vikings had left the routes.

What to watch out for during the build

Short-run injection molding means softer part edges and no locating pins. It pays to clean up the mating surfaces, to try the parts dry and to glue in small steps. The glazing of the flight deck and the long row of windows in the fuselage call for patient masking. The smooth painted surfaces of an airliner also reveal every unevenness, so filling and sanding the joints decides the result here more than it would on a military machine hidden in camouflage.

Where the Vikings flew

In Britain they formed the backbone of the postwar route network, in South America they served on long routes over the pampas and in Europe smaller companies used them for freight as well. One example also went down in history: after a pair of Nene engines was installed, it became the world's first purely jet-powered transport aircraft in 1948.