Fantastic Four

After much debate on choosing my next builds, I have made my choices. This set of builds are all WWII aircraft. I’ve become addicted to the era as of late, so I’ll take a break on the modern jets.
Now for the kit list. The first pick is Revell’s Stearman Kaydet. A few months ago, I came across a picture of a Stearman painted in a zebra-ish paint scheme. These planes were called recall planes. They were essentially used to bring in all the training pilots that were in the air. When you saw the very definitive paint scheme, you knew it was time to head back to the field. This is gonna be a simple build. I’ll more than likely spend more time on painting than building. So far, I have the cockpit finished and I just glued the fuselage halves together tonight.
My next choice is Academy’s TBF-1 Avenger. This kit was purchased about a year ago and kept getting put off. I figure that now is the time to get it built. I haven’t traveled far into this one yet. It looks like a typical Academy kit so I kind of know what to expect.
The final plane is actually yielding two kits. Also from Academy, I am building two A6M5c Zero’s. At first I was just going to build one in normal Japanese markings. As I was researching colors for the cockpit, I decided that I wanted to build the Akutan Zero. During WWII, Japanese pilot, Tadayoshi Koga, crashed his Zero on Akutan Island in Alaska. As luck would have it, a PBY pilot noticed the wreck and recorded the position of the aircraft. To make a long story short, we recovered the Zero and restored it to exploit the aircrafts weaknesses. So I decided to build the restored version with American markings. Then I got to thinking that I should do a before and after build. That’s where the second Zero comes into play. The plan is to build Petty Officer Koga’s Zero as it would have looked before the crash. The second plane will be the after version in a bare metal paint job. I’ll have to do some more research before I get too involved, though. Some custom decals are probably on the docket as well. I’m looking forward to getting these two added to the shelf.