1:72 Fairey Firefly (wet decals)

The two-seat workhorse of the decks

The Fairey Firefly was neither fast nor nimble, but it was versatile. A two-man crew, a powerful Griffon engine and unusual extending flaps gave it the ability to work over the sea for long hours, search for targets, correct gunfire and carry heavy stores under the wings. The Fleet Air Arm used it in the closing stage of the war in the Pacific and again over Korea, where it was among the hardest-working machines of the whole conflict.

The six subjects of the set cover a surprisingly wide range. Two machines come from Korean operations off the decks of the Glory and the Triumph, the second of them taking part in the strike of July 3, 1950, one of the first air attacks of the whole war. Then follows an aircraft from the deck of the Theseus, a yellow-and-black striped target tug of the Royal Australian Navy from 1959, a machine of the Royal Thai Navy and a British aircraft from the spring of 1945 with a name of its own that is a play on words.

Recommendations for the build:

• the target tug version has conspicuous stripes on the lower wing surfaces
• the Korean machines carry stripes on the fuselage and wings for quick recognition
• the dark blue naval finish tolerates a light lightening of the panel centers

The sheet is meant for a kit in the matching scale, which you will not find in the package. For a modeler it is a set from which both a completely inconspicuous wartime machine and a strikingly striped training aircraft can be chosen.

In color terms this is an exceptionally varied selection for such a small sheet. Beside the dark shade of the Fleet Air Arm you will find the bright yellow areas of the training machine, a sober Thai finish and the recognition stripes from Korea. Anyone building a series gets six clearly different models from a single envelope.