Airfix 1/144 De Havilland Comet 4b Dan-Air London

This is the Airplane that for every reason, must be on every collection...

This plane made history in every point of view you can imagine... It was the very first jet liner to fly, in the fifties. It was sleek, elegant beautyfull... The engines inside the wing, the controls, it was ahead of its time in every way. Thin alluminium skin on the outside... Too thin... And add up to that a detail on the windows, which instead of its holes being made without corners, it was in straight lines.... Worst, instead of the windows being glued, as projected, were riveted... And add up all that, and after a around 3000 flight cycles, of compression and decompression, and the thin alluminium skin suffers from metal fatigue... That phenomenon was known to engineers, but it was not taken in account... It was a severe wake up call... After that, metal fatigue was known and researched... Every material has defects, sometimes cracks on the sub-microscopic level... When you apply tension, the crack by itself does nothing, if advances, does so very little... but to that thousands of times, or with vibration, and the crack propagates, until a point where there is more voids than material to hold, and at a tension much bellow its theoretical, it will brake... That is what happend to the fuselage, in flight... Several airplanes just desintegrated in flight...
The problem ended up being corrected, thicker skin, different alloy, better manufacturing, and in this version, the 4b, the fatigue problem was long gone... But it was too late... Other airplanes had entered the market, the Caravelle and the BAC 111 were being used in short-medium routes, without having had the bad advertising... And later on, the "death stroke" was given with the game changer Boeing 707...

The model kit is fairly neat! Not so many detail, but the essencial is there. Landing gear is "rough",  but not that bad, if we consider it is an old mould.

But when sitting on it, can actually look good.

If you add the tubbing as the exhaust nozzles, it can look much better. Even if it is a simple kit, and it can be a weekend build, it ends up looking good!

And that is the point of model building. Have some nice time building it, having some challenges, but not getting desperate. And this old model ends up doing that. It is not a perfect one, but can look very nice, and it is a piece of airline and engineering history.