Boeing B-17 emergency landing
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- 1:72
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The USAAF Flying Fortress Y*GN was damaged at its return from a mission over Germany, and made an emergency landing on the Sint-Denijs-Westrem airfield near Ghent on Jan 10, 1945. The airfield was used at that time by the RAF . The story of the aircraft is documented at the website 303rdbg.com/pp-44-8495.html which is dedicated to the 303th Bomber Group. The tail surfaces of this aircraft were damaged on a mission over Germany and therefore it could not reach its base in the UK and made a landing on the airfield near Ghent, which was at that time used by the 131 Polish Wing of the RAF.
The runway was too short for a big plane like the B17, and it ran into soft soil where it damaged one side of the undercarriage
I won the old Airfix kit in a raffle and decided that it could be damaged beyond repair for this diorama.
I built the kit with a some detail on the inside, with the Eduard interior detail kit, mainly to avoid an "empty" look through the canopy windows. The structure of the damaged tail was made with plastic strip and rods and the crippled skin was made from a milk bottle cover.
Very visible details were the lowered flaps, for which I used the Eduard landing flaps detail kit.
On the landing B-17 had always the ventilation louvres of the engines in open position, and the kit parts are too difficult to modify. So I bought the Quickboost sets for the engines and cowlings, which are made of soft resin and could be cut open.
On one side the propeller touched the ground and was bent. In my case by heating the plastic near the flame of a lighter.
As the airfield was in hands of the RAF , I used the Airfix RAF emergency , the spectators came from the Heller RAF personnel set and to complete the scenery I used Americans from the Preiser ground crew set.