Junkers Ju52
I was always fascinated by this plane, maybe because it was made of corrugated aluminum sheets and when I was a kid I could just not imagine how that could fly. And doesn’t it look cool? Originally designed as a passenger plane for 17 passengers with its maiden flight on October 13, 1930, it was then misused by the Third Reich as a military aircraft. It was produced between 1931 and 1952. In a civilian role, it flew with over 12 airlines, including Swissair and Deutsche Luft Hansa, as both a passenger carrier and a freight hauler. After WW2 it was still in service with some airlines for a long time, and now Lufthansa has a functioning unit and you can actually book flights on it, also using miles collected with Miles & More.
When I was kid my dad bought me and my brother a plastic model kit. Either from Revel or from Airfix. I could not find the package anymore. I think it was 1:100 scale and the plastic parts were dark green, so obviously it was the military version. Back then all WW2 airplanes fascinated me. It was one of the first plastic models we ever built, so we did not paint it, and just glued it together. It did not look very attractive and sort of went to the upper part of my shelve to leave the more visible lower shelves for the more exciting models like the Ju88 and the Me262.
When I was in Germany in early 2021, I thought about what airplane model would look nice on my office table next to the BMW R75/5 model engine. I thought about the Iron Annie, but then plastic kits were quite expensive and I decided to go for the more sexy ME109 fighter plane. But Scheiber had a paper model kit, I had built many Schreiber planes, ships, some cars and houses when I was a kid. Usually when my parents dropped us at our grandparents place for a longer period they would give us some Schreiber kits so we had something to do while they were away. The Schreiber Ju52 was also at scale 1:100, so for sentimental reasons I bought it. it was the civilian version of Lufthansa thought. It ended up in our Storage room for some time.
Recently I had two write up two projects. I was bound to the house for two weeks, weekends included. To maintain my sanity I needed a small project to do in writing breaks. So I decided to finally build the Iron Annie during writing breaks.