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Just like with the Polish AEG there is a polish link even in this Turkish machine. It was flown by Ludomil Rayski who was later to rise to the rank of General in command of the Polish Air Force just before the outbreak of WWII. He was later demoted and thrown out of the air force in an effort to scapegoat the failure of the Polish Air Force to stand up to the Luftwaffe in 1939. He subsequently flew for the British on the African ferry routes, with 318 photo reconnaissance squadron and with 301 Special Duties Flight flying in supplies to the partisans of Europe…in short a fascinating character!
The machine has camouflage that I found most probable but is in no way confirmed by any pictures. It has the enlarged, tropical, radiator as opposed to the shorter, continental model.
The model is Copper State Models resin kit that I got two years ago. The mold quality is good but the subject of the AEG is a real challenge to be made out of resin. The wings are solid and their weight seriously stretches them downward. I tried to offset this by shortening some of the interplane struts, especially the outers in order to stretch them gently so they would not droop down. Cooper supplies white metal interplane struts, which I only used for the “V” struts and the wheel struts, the rest were fashioned out of copper, oval tubing. A nice touch is the inclusion of pretty good
For the rigging I used EZ line, the amazing stretching elastic which makes it pretty easy to complete all the rigging in one evening as opposed to metal wire or fishing line, I used before.
Here are some picturese of my einedekker... "Standard" Ernst Udet markings, old Eduard kit, one of the first few Eduard kits available.
253.05 is a factory fresh Albatros, one of the few with the factory supplied camouflage in the shape of the sworl pattern fabric that was stretched on the flying surfaces from the top and in this rare case also stretched ( or glued? ) around the entire fuselage. The plane was assigned to Franz Peter, an ace with 6 vicotries of which only one was on this machine. An interesting detail about this plane despite its psychodelic camouflage is the custom mounting of the Shwartzlose machine guns which were not hidden in the fuselage but mounted on a horizontal panel in front of the cockpit so they would be at exactly eye level. This modification is probably more likely to have been carried out in the field, not in the factory as it is definately non-standard. The kit is an Edurard with same conversions as in the case of Fauntleroy's machine. The camoflage is Mike Grant's excellent decal sheet ( or two of them ). The decals are truly excellent, they even have a "fabric feel" after they dry and before Future is applied. The Ying Yang symbol is a composit of some hinomarus from a decidedly off topic subject.
153.11 Is one of Linke-Crawford's well documented machines. Two of them carried the falcon, 153.11 and 153.16, the camouflage consisted of green base and hand applied sworls of about 2-4 cm diameter. This effect was achieved by bying a custom rubber stamp set at your local, friendly Office Max. I then took out the small case "@" symbol, modified it a bit, glued onto the end of a matchstic and viola!....custom stamp. All the other features of this machine are standard issue Oeffag factory, no frills here. The machine itself was an ace accounting for 5 Italians in the Great War.