![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Well, like the bacon double cheese-burger, the Whirlwind had two of everything yet somehow remained digestible. Second World War planes: who else offered a 1:24 scale Spitfire? But the jewel in this model builder’s collection (though I have to stress pocket money restraints meant squadrons were impossible and even finger-fours of anything a stretch) was the Westland Whirlwind. Even though Airfix’s first kit was a tractor, the company’s name made it pretty clear where the action was: planes. And while my recently revived interest in model making has centred around the armoured fighting vehicles of the Second World War (not WW2, it isn’t a sequel) it was Airfix that started me off and that made me so darned familiar with the notion of flight that by the time I was ten I possessed opinions. Let’s be honest, if it weren’t for Airfix would we even be having this cosy chat?įor I am a child of the Airfix era – to the point where Airfix was the word for model making. But flight became commonplace in my imagination long ago, long before easyJet and Flybe offered the miracle on the cheap, back in the 1970s, the Golden Age of Airfix. That the Wright Brothers (or whichever putative French rivals or steam-driven British claimants) slipped earth’s surly bonds within a mere six decades of man landing on the moon – less than an expected lifetime – should become routine business, as vast Airbuses slide through west London skies past my office window, remains objectively bonkers. “Aviation, the twentieth century miracle, the giddiest of all of mankind’s gifts to itself, fixing the imagination to the possibility of the seemingly impossible, is something – unbelievably – we have come to take for granted. ![]()
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