SM.81 Pipistrello - 220 Sqadriglia - Bari 1943
Komentáre
Evan B... autorYes, it is. Took three evenings worth of paint booth time, but I think its worth it.
Evan B... autorThanks guys. I started out with the ochre over a pre-shaded base coat. After that had sufficiently dried, I marked out the basic pattern very lightly with a pencil. I spent one night spraying the green blotches, the next night the brown. I spent a bunch of time after doing touch up and weathering/shading with oils. Probably the most time I've ever spent on a paint scheme. But I'm in love with Italian camouflage, so there'll likely be more…
ClementVery impressive work.
I imagine the camouflage designer walked into a zoo and thought "If it works for the giraffe, it's got to work on planes too".
Moreno BaruffiniFermi tutti!!!! What a great model!!!
What about the first pictures? It was a captured plane displayed in Australia?
Evan B... autorThanks, the photos show the aircraft that I'm portraying. It was captured at Bari in 1943 when the RAAF took over the airfield. The sequence of photos (and more from the Australian War Memorial Archive) depict a religious service being given in one of the airfield's hangars shortly after its capture.
Album info
There were no shortage of beautiful Italian tri-motors built before and during WWII. While the thoroughbred SM.79 Sparviero gets most of the love, at the beginning of the war, and indeed throughout the previous Spanish Civil war, the same firm's SM.81 Pipistrello was the most numerous bomber in the Italian Air Arm's inventory. The Pipistrello, or "bat" in English, was an obvious descendant of the pre-war Savoia Marchetti S.73 airliner. Its airliner lineage meant that it was joy to fly and maintain and could carry a heavy payload. Because of this, a great many of these pre-war bombers were still in service at the end of the war, having been converted to the transport role.
At least one SM.81 was in a hangar at the Italian Airfield in Bari on the Aegean coast when the RAAF took up residence at the field in 1943. A large collection of photos in the Australian War Memorial's archive show the war-worn bat acting as a backdrop to a mass held shortly after the airfield's capture. I was drawn to the stripy-giraffe camouflage scheme, most often seen on SM.81s and 79s during the Spanish Civil War, and the miss-matched engine cowlings complete with tropical filters. This bat obviously had quite the service life.
The model is Italeri's recent (2009 tool) SM.81 kit in 1/72 scale. It was built out of the box, the only changes being to the paint scheme. The kit went together fairly well, but like most Italeri kits required a fair amount of fitting, filling and sanding. Painting was accomplished with AK's Real Colors Lacquers and hand work with artists oils. One thing not shown in the RAAF pictures of my subject were the aircraft numbers on the tail empennage. Research showed that the 220 and 221 squadrons were present at Bari, both squadrons operating a mixed roster of Fiat BR.20s and SM.81s. The 220-9 number is an educated guess and was provided by decals pulled from the spares bin.
