| | |  | | | Home » » » » | | | | | | Product Details: | | | Package Length:
| 10.1 inches | | Package Width:
| 7.0 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.8 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.5 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 1 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
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2 of 3 found the following review helpful:
Just like the Yankee Lady!Sep 03, 2009
Bought one of these at Burke Lakefront Airport in Cleveland a few weeks ago. Put it together in about three minutes. It's an amazingly good model of the "Memphis Belle". The only thing that looks sort of hokey are the gun turrets, but the overall effect of the model is great. Well worth having for the money.
Interestingly enough, I bought this model from a display that was set up in the airport to compliment the visit of the "Yankee Lady", a restored B-17. The Yankee Lady and its crew regularly make visits to smaller airports like Burke across the country. As such, the historic aspects of the Army Air Force are brought to light, along with the heroic exploits of the men that manned the bombers and fighters that fought in the skies in both theaters during the second world war.
My advice: If a restored B-17 flies into your neighborhood, don't miss it. At Burke, I was able to walk through the airplane and take a look at the cockpit and navigator's station, the bomb bay and the waist gunner's stations. I couldn't get back into the tail section. It was cordoned off and would have been too small to crawl through anyway.
When you look at films like "The War Lover", "12 O'Clock High" or "Memphis Belle", the B-17 looks larger than life. It's not. Even though it's a big plane with a wingspan of 103 feet, it looks bigger on film. The space with which the crew had to operate in is not very expansive. Personally, I don't know how the crews could have endured so much flight time in such a small space - Especially taking into consideration two things: One, The fact that the B-17 was not pressurized; and Two, the terrifically cold temperatures at the plane's operational altitudes during daylight bombing raids.
Probably the first thing I noticed was the cockpit escape hatch below the pilot's seat. It was closer to the ground than I had imagined it would be. I can see how it would not have been that difficult for a young pilot (read: not older) to grab the sides of it and go feet first up into the cockpit like Steve McQueen, Matthew Modine, or Gregory Peck did on film. You wouldn't have needed to be seven feet tall in order to do that.
At the end of my visit, the Yankee Lady taxied down the runway and left the ground. I got a huge kick out of seeing the thing fly... Also, all the folks on the ground were great, and the flight crew was on hand to answer questions. The kids in the Civil Air Patrol were there, and they were great, too.
But alas, I diverge. This is a great model of a Legendary B-17. I like it a lot.
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