Bell Airacobra Mk.1

This should be a fairly straightforward project - the most difficult aspect will be getting the right "badly beaten Frankenstein" look. The plane was delivered to the UK in the DuPont versions of the 1940-41 RAF brown/green/sky (i.e. the sky was actually a gray). It was then repainted when, depending on where you read, the dark green was maybe overpainted, or maybe not, the underside was either redone in Medium Sea Grey or possibly left as is, and the brown was covered with Mixed Grey (seven parts MSG to one part Night). About the only bits that are certain are that the spinner and tail band are Sky Type S and that the grey at least started as Mixed Grey. After that, who knows - panels were replaced from other aircraft, or repainted, or both. Long after the rest of the RAF's P-39s had been shipped to Russia, this one hung around at the RAE, where it became Eric Brown's personal hack.

Supposedly, when the RAE was visited by a Bell rep in early 1946, he was given the opportunity to fly it. Afterwards, shaken, he said he'd never been in a less airworthy plane that could actually fly. So the machine went to the scrapyard in late March, and Brown got a Storch instead.

However, it goes down in history because Brown was still using it in April 1945, and wanted to be the first to land an aircraft with a tricycle gear on a carrier. He achieved a lot of firsts - first landing in a two-engined aircraft, first landing in a jet (which the P-39 landing was a proof of concept for) and of course was single-handedly responsible for carrier-qualifying a huge number of types.

Anyway, this rather worn aircraft needed a few changes before it could do a carrier landing. It needed an arrester hook, which is a somewhat odd example that is hinged at the back, to give a hook that could engage a wire even on an aircraft coming down in a very level attitude. The main gear doors were removed to avoid any chance of the wire getting tangled, and photo calibration markings were added, before he finally did the landing on 4th April 1945.