1/144 Be-12

My Believ Be-12 Flying Boat is finally done. It is a graceful bird in the air and in the water, though like most waterfowl it looks a little goofy on land.

The world is wrong: this machine has attractive lines.

The feet are definitely awkward and webbed.

 First, about the kit: it is a 1/144 scale kit from Amodel, a eastern European or possibly Russian kit manufacturer. They have a large line of interesting subjects in 1/144, mostly Russian subjects obscure in the west (like this Be-12), though they don't limit themselves to the sphere of the former Warsaw pact. They make a 1/144 scale DHC-5 Buffalo and a Grumman Albatross that I may pick up someday. They've been getting some western distributors recently, though I found them on hobbyterra.com/, a very good online shop in Russia that specializes in eastern model manufacturers.

My Be-12 kit came with photoetch parts, though also with the warning that Amodel used technology different from most manufacturers, and that they were for people with some experience under their belt. As it turns out, they were not kidding. My Be-12 was a new mould, but had a fair bit of flash, and nearly all the parts required judicious cleanup. Unlike some old Revell America kit, where it came from worn out moulds and was probably poorly engineered to begin with, Amodel's kit went together well - it's just that it requires more work to get there than what a modern modeller may be used to. The instructions were also pretty good.

No, if I'm a little disappointed in the kit, it's because it sort of got away from me. I made it over an unusually long time frame when a lot of other stuff was going on in my life, making it hard to focus on building. Further, I made two mistakes. First, I got the color shade rather wrong - you can find blue Be-12s (in fact, here is a picture of the very airplane I was aiming for) but I didn't fade the blue enough. To make matters worse, by the time I realized this, I had the decals on. (If you look at that photo, you can see that Be-12s have a water line. Amodel included this in the kit - but it inevitably tore when I tried to apply it.) To try and fade the paint, I tried some very thinned white - which sort of worked, but also caused some white splatters that sort of look like gull shit. Authentic! But not really what I wanted.

Amodel as mentioned included some photoetch parts, which look fine, but I had trouble 1) applying and 2) actually keeping on the kit. The detail for a 1/144 kit was actually kind of mind-blowing: they include such details as the tiny eye-hole on the nose, and a small porcupine's worth of tiny antennas, most of which did not survive my giant fingers. So, trouble concentrating AND bordering on beyond my skill - in retrospect, it's not surprising I didn't quite get there.

Still, the Gull in Teal cuts an impressive figure. Some people think it an ugly airplane - but I think it has a certain functional charm (like a duck or a goose, or maybe a Tern in flight) that I quite enjoy.

I'm excited to get onto my next project - a 1/144 scale B-36. Or a RB-36 to be specific, the reconnaissance-bomber version--

A short spiel on the Beriev Be-12 Chaika -

The Be-12 acttracted me for several reasons. First, it's an aircraft that never came to the west, and was rarely seen by the Western military during the cold war. Second, it's an amphibian (IE a flying boat with landing gear). Third, it's one of the last flying boats designed and deployed, so it lacks the turret barnacles of WW2 era flying boats, and has modern turboprop instead of reciprocating engines. And lastly, doing a little background reading, I discovered the Be-12's career is a triumph of sensible engineering - a utility infielder employed in a variety of roles, its one of the few ex-Soviet airplanes who's airframes were consumed through use rather than being shunted off to fields at the collapse of the USSR.

It was deployed at the start of the 1960s, to replace the Be-6, a similar flying boat dating back to World War 2. It's primary mission  was hunting American submarines, who in their first generation of cruise missiles, would have to launch close to the coast of Russia. It was equipped with sonar buoys, torpedoes that could hoam in acoustically, and even  tactical-nuclear depth charges. It was equipped with radar in the front and rear, and a MAD (Magnetic Anomaly Detector) boom in the rear.  The 'amphibious' aspect of the Be-12 was much appreciated by ground crews: the Be-6 had no landing gear, and while wading around in the Black Sea attaching wheels for getting a Be-6 into a beach-side hanger was no big deal, it was quite another matter in Murmansk and Vladivostok. It soon acquired a nickname: "Chaika' (Gull). NATO gave it the callsign 'Mail'.

The West considered it a throwback even in 1960, having decided that flying boats were a thing of the past. By 1970, America's advances in missile technology made the Be-12's original mission doubtful. It then became a maid-of-all-work for Soviet Naval Aviation, doing coastal maritime patrol, search and rescue, and acting as a transport. Easy to maintain and excellent to fly, the "chikia" was popular with pilots and ground crews alike. A total of 150 were made at Believ's factory at Tagarog, near the increasingly misnamed Sea of Azov. Nearly all Gulls made were still being used at the fall of the Soviet Union, and apparently were used until the airframes wore out. A few old Gulls are still in service, seemingly on the Black Sea and Crimea. After the fall of the USSR, some surplus Be-12s were converted to water bombers - like the CL-215, they can skim the surface of a lake to collect water, then return to the sky. They were only exported once, with Vietnam receiving four in the early 80s - though the Ukraine inherited a few in the divorce as well.

From the wonderful Wings of Russia series on youtube, here is some footage of a Be-12 in action. It's worth watching, if only to watch a airplane roll into the water off of a boat launch, and *then* retract its landing gear.

As you can see, the Be-12 is not exactly small.

A note for anybody thinking of building this model: the tail boom on the real thing does have an 'end cap', presumably for maintenance. I erased the lines on mine.

I added oil stains and exhaust on the tail last - in retrospect, oil effects might have been able to give me a more realistic look.

Life Magazine: That Time that America Ran out of Coffee

If you are reading this, you likely know about rationing in the Second World War. Both because of shortages and the pressing need to conserve cargo ship capacity, quite a few things ended up being rationed, or even just vanished from the shelves. One of these shortages that I particularly find interesting is American Coffee rationing since I kind of shudder to think what I'd be like if suddenly I was down to half a cup a day - and I only usually have 2.

The reason for the sudden shortage was simple: when America joined World War 2, the Nazi Kriegsmarine sent as many subs as it could to America's east coast, where they had a second 'Happy Time' sinking merchant ships sailing unescorted. The Kriegsmarine also sent Type IX U-boats to the Caribbean, where for a while they were as a wolf among sheep. That meant a drastic drop in South American Coffee being delivered to America, and thus, rationing. Life ran an article on how to make the best of it.

Imagine posting the sign above in a Starbucks.

Even FDR gave up his morning cup. Fortunately, the United States got their convoys and anti-sub defenses together, and the crisis passed in about a year. Then, there was a series of ads promoting coffee consumption - not for any brand, mind you. Just ads with the cheerful message Drink Coffee!

If you think being low on coffee would have made for a snappy, crabby nation, consider this: at one point in 1944, the America was out of cigarettes.

Now this was a spot shortage that seems to have sorted itself out by Christmas (this article is from November of '44) but still. An entire nation low on tobacco is a queasy thing to contemplate now - let alone in the 1940s, when everybody over the age of 14 has some sort of tobacco habit.

The Groundhog Still Sees a Shadow

As you can imagine with my interests, I've been keeping a close eye on Canada's attempts to buy a new jet fighter. Long story short, the program has been a total disgrace, with the single largest purchase of anything in Canada's history being handled with the same intelligence and transparency as a New Brunswick repaving contract being given to some local apparatchik's cousin. Anyway, here is the latest, courtesy of actual reporter David Pugliese of the Ottawa Citizen:

confusion reigns on the f-35 front in Ottawa

TL;DR: Last week it was floated by CBC and Reuters that the Cons were going ahead with the F-35 program. An announcement was supposed to happen today, but I think the two stories were trial balloons to see if it was safe for the Cons to just go ahead and do what they wanted to do. Apparently the Groundhog saw its shadow, because now they are keeping to the "saying absolutely nothing" strategy that they've stuck to ever since the auditor general's report. They are also preparing to "trot out a panel of independent [ed note: no neb do not just put quotation marks around the word independent] experts to counter allegations a review of the F-35 and its competitors was intended to provide political cover for purchasing the controversial stealth fighter." This is kinda weird, since the panel's finding haven't even been made public yet. Well, not so weird at all if you assume that the panel was set up explicitly to provide political cover for purchasing the controversial stealth fighter. This is somewhat suggested by the fact that these announcements are happening just before the summer recess in Parliament, and that the trial balloons were launched when Harper was in Normandy.

The four man panel is composed of three civil service mandarins, and one outspoken critic university professor of the purchasing process. A retired Canadian General was supposed to sit on this panel but he is now head of LockMart's Ottawa office. Two other things about the panel were revealed: that it is not allowed to actually recommend anything to the government, reportedly, only to "collect information" about what the manufactures are promising in the way of bribes industrial benefits to Canada, and maybe if there is time what the actual aircraft in question are like. The three alternates to the F-35 BTW are the Super Hornet, the Eurofighter, and the Rafale. Conspicuous in its absence is my personal choice, the F-15SE. Dassault, at any rate are apparently bringing their A-game to the competition, and I for one wish them bon chance, since I think the Rafale is a p. good choice and at any rate is gorgeous.