Something I made: Revell 1/144 Airbus A320

Airliners are a paradox. On the one hand they are these incredibly engineered devices that transport people with amazing speed, safety, and efficiency. If you are on a newer airliner, for most of us that's when we get to experience the leading edge of technology. On the other hand, they are (in some senses, anyway) boring - brilliantly engineered white goods that even a nerd like me can't readily tell apart. I suppose that boring is a feature, not a bug: airliners that tend to cause excitement also tend to be the ones that are rare, blow up a lot, or both. Success comes with efficiency and safety and ubiquity - I guess we shouldn't be surprised that this makes them anodyne as well. The A320 is a fine example of the breed: a brilliantly engineered airplane about as titillating as the phrase "PowerPoint presentation."

I started this Revell kit nearly two years ago, and left it half finished in my closet when I couldn't find any Air Canada/Canadian decals. I think I finished it finally because I thought I could tackle the complex curves on the two-tone paint. I faded both the upper white and the lower grey, and had to mix the Lufthansa tail color myself; it's not perfect but I'm pleased it turned out so well considering my limited paint selection. Quick kit review: it's an older/very produced kit, with comparatively a lot of flash, but the engineering (aside from the landing gear doors) is solid, and you shouldn't have any trouble cleaning it up into a nice kit.

The engines are always a point of detail on airliners. The fan blades are espeically difficult to get right, simply because the callout colors in the instructions say 'aluminum' but photos of the real think look like a much darker metal; steel covered in soot or something. They usually have a chrome ring around the engine edges which can be a devil to mask.

The rear engine nozzle is painted with is alclad stainless steel. With all the masking, painting, and touch up, the engines (just like in the real thing) probably took the same amount of work as the rest of the fuselage.

The other thing I can pass along is that the cockpit windows in this kit should be put in early; cockpit windows are kind of the 'eyes' of the airplane, a focal point for attention, and it has to be fitted correctly to look right.

If you build models but have never tried an airliner, you might try it simply because you would not believe how good the resources are online for them. I picked this registration at random and could search it via airliners.net, and had a vast collection of not only the proper type of aircraft (A320-200) but could get a whole raft of pictures of the exact airframe D-AIQF.  It turns out this airplane isn't used by Lufthansa anymore - it now flies for Germanwings (some sort of Lufthansa subsidiary.)

 As airliners go, the A320 might be the most successful airliner of the past 30 years. With nearly 7000 aircraft in service right now, you've probably flown on one if you fly at all frequently. If you live in a big urban area, there's likely a A320 flying nearby. Like indoor plumbing, the A320 is taken for granted, but you'd miss it if it suddenly stopped working.