WIZARD OF

WARPLANES
Over nearly half a century, Willy Messerschmitt
designed a remarkable array of aircraft
By Stephan Wilkinson

T
he career of Germany's most famous airplane designer nearly of lightplanes. Messerschmitt had one advantage over his competi-
sputtered out before it took off. Wuly Messerschmitt (only tors: Since the RLM initially didn't consider him part of the formal
his mother called him Wilhelm) began as a buüder of stone- competition, he could design as he wished rather than having to
simple post-World War I gliders, then moved on to powered stay within the parameters stipulated by the aviation ministry. The
sailplanes with what would today be considered riding-mower result was the Bf-109—the smallest, simplest and lightest possible
engines. A series of Hght sport planes followed, and during the late airframe that could be wrapped around one puot, the requisite
1920s and early '30s Messerschmitt designed several successful armament and a large and powerful V12 engine.
four- to 12-seat "airliners." In 1935, thanks to such a modest avia- The Bf-109 was by no stretch of the imagination an up-engined
tion background. Third Reich officials told him to not even bother Bf-108, though the family resemblance between the two is strong.
competing against Germany's major manufacturers for the con- What the 109 did take from its famüy-sedan precursor was Willy's
tract to build the Luftwaffe's new air-superiority fighter. extreme emphasis on simple, modular construction with major
Messerschmitt tested just how small his chances were by quietly forces concentrated at a few points on the airframe, such as the
putting out word that he was considering sturdy engine mount suspended from the
leaving the industry and accepting a profes- firewall, where landing-gear loads were also
sorship at Danzig Technical University. He localized. Bf/Me-109s could be built in
was then encouraged by the Reichsluftfahrt- 4,000 to 6,000 man-hours, depending on
ministerium—the RLM, the bureaucracy the year of manufacture, whue it took two
that controlled all aviation in Nazi Ger- or three times as long to build a complex,
many—to hurry up and accept the job, largely hand-wrought Spitfire or Hurricane.
because his work as an airplane designer WiUy went on to create a second game-
"was of no importance." Talk about dis- changer, and he did it while the world was
couraging words... collapsing around him, his factories bat-
But they didn't discourage Willy Messer- tered by Allied bombers. American and
schmitt. On his first try at gaining a real British fighters by this time were superior to
military contract, he produced the Bf-109, even the best of his 109 versions. Yet while
the most revolutionary and effective fighter the Yanks and Brits struggled to create a
of its day. Spitfire advocates will argue few lumpish proto-jets, few of which ever
that point endlessly, but nobody can deny made it into limited combat, Messerschmitt
it was an accomplishment akin to Glyde directed the design and engineering of the
Gessna turning out the P-51 after a lifetime Wilhelm "Willy" Messerschmitt in 1938. Me-262, and his company produced more

22 AVIATION HISTORY MARCH 2014

"Black 2," a Messerschmitt Me-109G-10
converted from a Spanish-built Hispano-
engine version, sports the markings of
Luftwaffe ace Friedrich-Karl Müller.
than 1,400 of the twin-engine jets, 300 of which saw action.
Think ofthat: While the U.S. and Britain were stiU experiment-
ing, a nation that had already lost the war managed to produce
an effective operational jet fighter 100 mph faster than the Allied
fighters that opposed it, thanks to Willy Messerschmitt and the
team of engineers he had gathered. (To be fair, no legendary air-
craft designer ever created a complex, high-performance airplane
on his own. Robert Lusser, Messerschmitt's project office director,
and Richard Bauer, chief design engineer, had a great deal to do
with the design of the Bf-109; and engineers Wolfgang Degel, Karl
Althoif and Rudolf Seitz were crucial to the development of the
Me-262, a project directed by Waldemar Voigt because Lusser had
been hired away by Willy's archenemy Ernst Heinkel.)
And let's not belittle Messerschmitt's lightplanes. In 1934 he cre-
ated a four-seat personal aircraft, the Bf-108
Taifun, that would only see its equal in per-
formance and efficiency when the Beech
Bonanza was introduced in 1947. There are
Taifun owners today—the design stayed
in production with the French Nord com-
pany into the 1960s—who wouldn't trade
their rides for any single-engine spamcan
yet produced.
Willy got his own private pilot's license
in 1929, which wasn't an occasion for uni-
versal deKght. Fritz HiUe, sales director of Messerschmitt's first
the company for which Willy worked.
Bayerische Flugzeugwerk, went public with the claim that Messer-
schmitt's new flying hobby was an "irresponsible distraction from
his duties as developmental head" of the firm. Hule then resigned,
blaming Messerschmitt for a variety of financial problems that BFW
was experiencing—^the company was close to bankruptcy—and im-
mediately went to work for Heinkel, making it clear that the whole
ploy was an attempt to discredit BFW.
As a pilot, Messerschmitt was no Kurt Tank, the famous Focke-
Wulf designer who was as skilled a test puot as he was an engineer
(and who had worked for Wüly in the early 1930s). Messerschmitt
had his own Bf-108, though he only flew it with a company pilot in
the right seat. On one flight, he announced that he wanted to fly the
whole leg on his ovm, with the copilot acting solely as a silent safety
pilot. Messerschmitt forgot to retract the Taifim's landing gear after
Messerschmitt stands In front of his Bristoi Cherub-powered Motorflugzeug M 17, now on display at Munich's Deutsches Museum.
24 AVIATION HISTORY MARCH 2014
takeoff and flew the whole distance with the gear down. To Willy's
embarrassment, his copilot, per orders, never said a word.
Messerschmitt went on to direct the design of a surprisingly var-
ied assortment of aircraft, including the Me-209, which held the
world piston-engine speed record until 1969; a four-engine Me-264
"Amerika Bomber" (a planned six-engine version never flew, nor
did the sweptwlng version with auxiliary turbojet engines); the
world's first swing-wing jet, the P. 1101 prototype, model for the
U.S. Air Force's Bell X-5; and a massive cargo glider that in its
powered form was the C-5 of its day, the Me-321/323. The one
"Messerschmitt" that WiUy had little to do with was the Me-163
rocket plane, a product of Alexander Lippisch's fevered brain.
Messerschmitt in fact wanted to redesign it as the Me-334, with
a Daimler-Benz 605 VI2 and pusher prop in place of the danger-
designs were saiipianes such as the S 10, shown flying in 1922.
ous, barely controllable bomb that Lippisch had placed in its tail
(Messerschmitt engineers called it the "Flying Firecracker").
I
t all started when 15-year-old Messerschmitt apprenticed
himself to German glider pioneer Friedrich Harth just before
World War I. Since gliding was the only way to train a cadre
of future Luftwaffe pilots without openly flouting the pro-
visions of the Versailles Treaty, the sport became particularly
important in Germany in the 1920s, by which time Messerschmitt
was improving Harth's designs and increasingly working on his
own. (Germany was so glider-sawy that the Luftwaffe developed
the concept of troop-carrying gliders, first used in combat in
May 1940, during a stunningly successful glider assault on the
"impregnable" Belgian Fort Eben-Emael. Even today, German
Despite a famiiy resemblance, the Bf-108 shared very few design features with its groundbreaking successor, the Bf-109 fighter.

competition sailplanes reign supreme.) argued piece of Messerschmitt trivia: Is Willy's fighter a Bf-109 or
WiUy had a lot to learn. His first few designs were controlled by an Me-109? Reasonable historians say it's both, depending on the
pivoting the entire wing from a joint above the minimal fuselage— variant. By 1938, Messerschmitt quietly controlled enough of
part wing-warping, part angle-of-attack shifting, a concept he'd BFW's stock that the company made him its managing director
learned from Harth, who called it "wing control." There were no and chairman of the board. The 109 and its designer had become so
other movable control surfaces, just a trimmable tailplane. Even well known that Bayerische rode his coattaüs by renaming itself
when Messerschmitt buut his first powered airplane, in 1924—the Messerschmitt AG. As a result, aircraft designed and developed by
S 15, basically a motorglider—he still resorted to wing-warping Bayerische are properly designated Bfs, and those birthed by suc-
for lateral control, though at least now the wing was fixed and the cessor Messerschmitt AG can be considered Mes. Which means the
airplane had an elevator. A through D models of flie 109 are Bf-109s, and the E through Z
His next design, the S 16, looked like a real airplane rather than a models are Me-109s. (Yes, there was an Me-109Z—a twin-fuselage,
spindly single-seat glider, and it had normal ailerons, a rudder, an F-82-like variant that was bunt but never flown.) This is also the
elevator, wheeled landing gear and a passenger seat. Wuly was done opinion of the historical office of today's German air force.
not only with Harth's wing-control concept but also with unpow- Others claim all 109s are Bfs and that there's no such thing
ered flight, other than the aberrant World War II Me-321 Gigant. as an Me-109. Yet if you ask any air-minded U.S. WWII vet to
In 1924 Messerschmitt founded his own company. He continued name the airplane, to a man they'll say, "It's a Messerschmitt—
his and Harth's model num- an Me-109." Which gave rise
bering sequence, but the to that hoariest of aviation
designator S {Segelflugzeug, jokes—the one that comes in
or sailplane) became an M many varieties but always has
{Motorflugzeug, or motor- as its punch line "Those fokkers
plane). The S 16 was fol- were Messerschmitts."
lowed by the M 17. That

H
sequence ended with the ow, exactly, did an
sole 1934 M 35—a six-seat, aeronautical engineer
single-engine passenger car- become powerful
rier buut for a Romanian enough to buy the
airline. At that point Adolf company he worked for? After
Hifler's RLM began assign- all, KeUy Johnson never bought
ing designators and model Lockheed, nor did Ed Heine-
numbers to Germany's mann ever come close to taking
various manufacturers, so over Douglas. But Willy Mes-
Messerschmitt's next design serschmitt found himself a rich
necessarily became the sponsor...and roommate. At
Bf-108—Bf because WiUy the time when BFW was in
Messerschmitt was now financial trouble, he had met
design director of Bayerische and fallen for the Baroness Luly
Flugzeugwerke. von Michel-Raulino Stromeyer,
This eventually became Charies Lindbergh examines the cockpit of a Bf-109 during an the daughter of a wealthy Bavar-
the excuse for an endlessly interwar visit to the Messerschmitt piant in Augsburg, Bavaria. ian family. She was smart and

MARCH 2014 AVIATION HISTORY 25

beautiful, but she was seven
years older than Willy and
already married, to financier
Otto Stromeyer.
Nevertheless, Wuly asked
Lilly for help, and she per-
suaded her husband to buy
an 87.5-percent share of
BFW; Messerschmitt owned
the remaining 12.5 percent
of the stock. The more they
saw of each other, the more
Lilly became fascinated by
the daring, dashing young
engineer. He was distinguished-looking, Future Luftwaffe Inspector General Erhard Milch (left)
in a dark-eyed, sharp-featured, professo- became Messerschmitt's enemy due to the crash of the
rial way. And above all, he was a vivid BFW M 2 0 (above), which killed pilot Hans Hackmack.
contrast to her boring, stuffy husband.
Inevitably, the baroness and the engineer jump out only 250 feet above the ground. His parachute
began an aftair. never deployed, and he was killed. It was later deter-
They went about it quite openly, which mined that if he'd simply continued the landing, all would
was shocking to the "cackling busybodies," have ended well. Hackmack was a close ftiend of Erhard
as one Messerschmitt biography put it, of Milch's, and Milch never forgave Messerschmitt for react-
Catholic Bavaria. To say nothing of the fact that Otto Stromeyer ing coldly to the pilot's death. As far as Wuly was concerned,
was the chairman of Messerschmitt's board, of which WiUy had Hackmack had screwed up and destroyed his airplane. Milch
become a member. But never mind, that was Willy's way—the thereafter thwarted Messerschmitt every chance he got, cancel-
heU with convention, with the ordinary way of doing things— ing contracts and projects, removing RLM subsidies and openly
and the baroness was equally bold. Independently wealthy, she favoring other manufacturers. In Milch's defense, Messerschmitt
soon divorced her husband, took control of her own share of the seemed unlovable to others as well; he and Ernst Heinkel loathed
Stromeyer Messerschmitt stock and moved in with Wuly, though each other—Heinkel considered him a glider-builder, not a legiti-
they weren't married until 1952. mate warplane designer—and Willy parted ways with pioneering
Throughout a large part of his career, Wuly Messerschmitt had designer Alexander Lippisch during development ofthe Me-163.
one implacable and powerful enemy: Erhard Milch, a bureaucrat Wuly wasn't perfect as a designer. He has often been accused of
who became head of the RLM and ultimately a Luftwaffe General- building flimsy airplanes that crashed, but only by people who con-
feldmarschall. Their bad blood extended back to the late 1920s, fuse lightness with "flimsiness." Some of his aircraft did crash, most
when Much was managing director of the airline Luft Hansa. notably that Luft Hansa M 20, which also suftered two weather-
Messerschmitt designed and buut for Luft Hansa a single-engine, related fatal crashes in airline service (though Milch blamed Mes-
10-passenger airUner with a large but lightweight cantilever, single- serschmitt's design for the second of them, claiming the specified
spar wing—the M 20. Its payload as a percentage of gross weight gross weight resulted in an overload). But Messerschmitt's record
was remarkable, and its huge 500-hp BMW V12 engine could be was no worse than those of other designers ofthe time.
run at very low power settings in cruise, for economy. Landing-gear design, however, was a challenge that Messer-
Unfortunately, the first M 20 crashed as a result of some trailing- schmitt never quite conquered. In 1931 he invented "single-strut
edge wing fabric tearing loose during a landing approach, which landing gear"—a simple tubular strut housing the entire shock-
caused Luft Hansa's chief test puot, Hans Hackmack, to panic and absorbing mechanism with few moving parts, a concept that soon
became common. But a number of his
airplanes suffered landing-gear col-
lapses, and the problems created by the
narrow, knock-kneed, difficult-to-align
main gear on the 109 have been amply
discussed. The original Me-262 proto-
types had conventional taüwheel gear,
requiring a delicate tap on the brakes
during the takeoff run to get the tail off
the ground. When Messerschmitt as a
result added a tricycle-gear nosewheel, it
The dangerously unstable Me-210, Messerschmitt's worst design, damaged his reputation. often collapsed.

26 AVIATION HISTORY MARCH 2014

 Messerschmitt's worst blunder, however, was the Me-210. The
109 is easuy the most famous German airplane ever to fly, but the
210 has been called the worst single airplane Germany ever devel-
oped. Willy was asked by the RLM to quickly turn the Me-110 into
a dive bomber, since the Junkers Ju-87 Stuka was growing long in
the tooth and the 110 wasn't having much success as a twin-engine
fighter/bomber-destroyer. Messerschmitt, as was his wont, did as
he wished and instead developed a totally new airplane that turned
out to have dangerous stability problems. The Me-210 was laterally
unpredictable, and since its propellers were unusually far ahead of
the center of gravity, this could have been longitudinally destabi-
lizing, particularly if power was suddenly added during a too-low
landing approach.
Thanks to many accidents, including landing-gear collapses
while taxiing, the Me-210 was adjudged useless as a combat aircraft
and withdrawn from service; production was canceled. It was a
Horst Philipp pilots an Me-262A-1/c, outfitted with Gênerai Electric CJ-610 engines, over Ingolstadt, Germany, In September 2007.
hugely expensive mistake, and Messerschmitt's reputation suffered
a crushing blow. He was shifted to production oversight responsi-
bilities, and design duties were largely removed from his purview.
After World War II, WiUy Messerschmitt should have been a
beaten man. His fall from grace, from prosperity, from a position
of command and control was all but complete. His factories were
in ruins, and nobody seemed to care about his accomplishments.
He was briefly flown to London and interrogated after Germany's
surrender, then summarily shipped back to Germany for intern-
ment. Whue his counterparts Alexander Lippisch and Hans von
Ohain were swept up by Operation Paperclip and sent to the U.S.,
where they lived happily ever after, Messerschmitt ended up for-
gotten in a harsh, American-run camp called Heilbronn. He nearly
died of exposure and starvation during the winter of 1945-46. One
guard took it upon himself to shelter Messerschmitt inside a bar-
racks building, and perhaps because of what that soldier learned
from talking with him, the Americans finally found out who they
had imprisoned.
Messerschmitt was moved to slightly more comfortable quarters,
but only to await the 1948 Nuremberg Trials. Meanwhüe, a nephew
learned where he was being held and brought him a drafting table
and supplies. With them, Willy designed a watch that had only
three moving parts. He sold the drawings to a Swiss company for
5,000 Swiss francs—enough that it became Messerschmitt's post-
war start-up stake.
But first, WiUy was sentenced to two years in prison for know-
ingly using slave laborers, many of whom had come from Dachau,
near his Augsburg factory. Was Messerschmitt a Nazi? Yes. He
wore a swastika lapel pin constantly, and his party membership
number was 342354. Some say that he was not anti-Semitic, and
his membership was simply something he felt he needed to get the
government contracts that Erhard Milch had been blocking.
Upon his release, forbidden from laboring in the nonexistent
German aviation industry, Messerschmitt put his mind back to
work. First he designed a large wind turbine that, though never buut,
had all the characteristics of today's renewable-energy machines:
variable-pitch blades to maintain a constant rpm, automatic over-
speed protection and aircraft-quality alloy construction. He also
missed the boat in 1953, when he began but never finished work on
a "hydraulic turbojet engine" for forced-water marine propulsion.
Today such units propel jet boats and jet skis.
His first productive project was prefab housing to renew Ger-
many's carpet-bombed residential areas. His units were built using
the simplified alloy-frame construction techniques that Willy had
MARCH 2014 AVIATION HISTORY 27
Hispano Aviación S.A.'s Meriin-powered HA-1112 Buchón kept the Me-109 flying over Spain Into the 1950s—and thereafter in movies.

designed into the 109 and other airplanes, and the individual units Rolls-Royce Merlin engine—the unfortunately bloodhound-nosed
were stackable and expandable in multistory complexes. HA-1112 Buchón—and in 1951 it had called on Willy as a Buchón
adviser. In 1952 Messerschmitt put together a small team of German

B
y 1951, Messerschmitt had reassembled some of his war- engineers, including some who had worked for him during the war,
time crew and rented factory quarters in Munich to build and he designed a trainer for the Spanish air force.
home sewing machines—much needed in postwar Ger- The HA-100 looked much like the T-28 Trojan—not because
many. Production of these "Messerschmitts" continued until Wuly had copied the North American design but because both
1959, but quality control was poor, and they barely made a mark were buut to the same criteria: an advanced, piston-engine, tricycle-
on the market. gear, tandem-cockpit military trainer. Both the original T-28A and
Messerschmitt's best-known postwar product was his "bubble the HA-100 Triana, as it was called, used an 800-hp Wright R-1300
car," the KR 175 and 200—canopied, tandem-seat three-wheelers radial, and the Triana was slightly lighter and faster. The Spanish
that looked like rolling fighter cockpits. Today they are prized were happy and wanted Willy to build 40 for them, but Spain
by enthusiasts, and one sold at this year's Barrett-Jackson clas- couldn't afford the Wright engines. The two prototypes were
sic cars auction for $42,900. scrapped, though their wings
Willy was always the first to were used in Messerschmitt's
point out, however, that the next project: the HA-200 Saeta
KR was designed not by him jet trainer, a few of which are
but by aeronautical engineer still being flown by American
Fritz Fend. What Willy brought and European enthusiasts look-
to the party was his talent at ing for a cheap way to get into
rationalizing a final design for jet warbirding.
the most efficient production, Always in search of efficiency
just as he had with the Bf-109. and economy, WiUy recycled as
Neither the repentant Ger- much of the HA-100 design as
mans nor the Allies could forbid he could. But removing the big
Messerschmitt from working The lightweight HA-300 might have out-gnatted Folland's Gnat. radial from the nose and mount-
in another country's aviation ing the two French Turbomeca
industry, so WiUy approached both Spain and South Africa to see if Marboré jets conventionally—in the wing roots or somewhere
either fancied his designing and manufacturing airplanes for them. behind the cockpit—would create a weight shift requiring a sub-
South Africa passed, but Spain was a natural, since Germany had stantial redesign. So he stuck the small turbojets right where the
always had friendly relations with dictator Francisco Franco's gov- Wright had been, in the nose, just behind a catfish-mouth air inlet.
ernment, beginning with the provision of aircraft—including some When HASA tried to sell the HA-100 and -200 to other air forces,
of the very first Bf-109s—for Franco's rebels during the Spanish its sales brochures emphasized Messerschmitt's role, boasting that
Civil War. he had been "involved in every facet of the designs...both air-
The Spanish company HASA (Hispano Aviación S.A., which craft have been personally designed and worked through by Wuly
became CASA and eventually was absorbed by Airbus Industrie) Messerschmitt down to the last detail." Egypt bought 10 HA-200s
was already license-manufacturing a version of the 109 with a and built another 90 under license.

28 AVIATION HISTORY MARCH 2014

 It would be the last real Messerschmitt,
the final production airplane to fully
embody Willy's emphasis on light weight,
modular construction, the combination of
several functions into single components
and attention to reducing assembly labor.
But Messerschmitt had one last jewel in
his vault: the HA-300, a sweptwing fighter
that at least on paper was as sleek and
potent-looking as anything from Dassault
or Lockheed in the early 1960s. WiUy's super-
jet was intended to use an afterburning
Bristol (later Rolls-Royce) Olympus engine,
a version of which would power the Con-
corde. The British demanded that Spain
co-fund development of the reheat version,
which the Spanish couldn't afford any more
than they could afford elderly Wright radiais.
Egypt, however, ended up ovraing the
HA-300 design when it bought the licens-
ing rights to the HA-200, and the Egyptians
were getting tired of Soviet demands as a
condition of supporting Egypt's MiG fleet.
They wanted their own jet, so they built
two HA-300 prototypes, one of which first
flew (with a non-afterburning Olympus)
in 1964. Messerschmitt enticed his friend
Ferdinand Brandner to come to Egypt, for
Brandner had helped develop the Junkers
Jumo 222 jet engine and, after being for-
cibly adopted by the Soviets, designed the
most powerful turboprop in the world
at the time—the 12,000-hp Kuznetsov
NK-12. Brandner was developing an
afterburning engine for Messerschmitt's
HA-300 when the 1967 Six-Day War—a
disaster for the Egyptians—and renewed
Soviet ties scotched the project. Had they
not, Messerschmitt and Brandner might
well have created the lightest supersonic
fighter in the world.
WiUy Messerschmitt died in September
1978 at the age of 80—the only aircraft
designer ever to give his name to such a vast
and remarkable array of aircraft spanning
nearly half a century, -t-
For further reading, frequent contributor
Stephan Wilkinson recommends: Willy Mes-
serschmitt: Pioneer of Aviation Design, by
Hans J. Ebert, Johann B. Kaiser and Klaus
Peters; Sharks of the Air: WiUy Messer-
schmitt and How He Built the World's
First Operational Jet Fighter, by James Neal
Harvey; and Augsburg Eagle: The Story of
the Messerschmitt 109, by William Green.
Build a Messerschmitt Me-210
T
est pilots who flew the Messer-
schmitt Me-210 in the late 1930s
reported serious design flaws.
Airplanes with checkered histories are
usually overlooked by model manu-
facturers, but in 1972 ReveU issued a
l/72nd-scale Me-210A-l that also fea-
tured parts for the improved Me-410.
And in 1998 Italeri released a new tooling
of the fighter, also in l/72nd scale. Both
kits had short production lives, but a
determined modeler can stiU find Italeri's
offering at swap meets or on the Internet.
I started construction on my Italeri
kit by painting the cockpit Schwarzgrau,
RLM-66, as indicated for day fighters in
the Official Monogram Painting Guide to
German Aircraft, 1935 to 1945. An expan-
sive "greenhouse" covers the pMot's and
gunner's positions. This is an area where
considerable time and effort will add
interest. The pilot's area requires little
improvement, but the gunner's compart-
ment needs scratch-built enhancements.
The A-1 version, which had a bomb
bay in the nose, was often used as a dive
bomber. I improved this area by "box-
ing" it in with plastic sheet. Next I assem-
bled two 1,100-pound bombs, sprayed
them dark green and set them aside.
Carefully cement the fuselage parts
together, to ensure the cockpit rests level.
I applied glue to the tabs on the horizon-
tal stabilizers, then left the assembly to
dry with blocks of balsa wood propping
them at 90 degrees to the vertical tau.
It's easy to overlook the two small tabs
of plastic that are glued into the cutouts
in the bottom of the main wing engine
nacelles. These rectangles of plastic serve
as a base that supports the main landing-
gear legs. With the main gear supports
solidly in place, glue the right and left
wing to the bottom section, and then
cement the completed wing assembly to
the fuselage.
Next fit the nosepiece into the front of
the fuselage. At this point it wül become
evident whether or not the cockpit has
been cemented level into the fuselage.
You may need to correct the assembly by
trimming, sanding and filling.
While the fuselage is drying, assemble
the cowhngs for the Daimler-Benz DB
60IF engines. These cowls are "handed"
for the counter-rotating props, so use
care when gluing them to the wings.
Some filling and sanding will be needed
at the wing-to-fuselage joints and also the
attachments for the engine nacelles.
Check over your work, then finish off the
basic construction with a spray of primer.
German aircraft camouflage colors
have long been controversial for model-
ers. Luftwaffe Fighter Aircraft in Proftle, by
Claes Sundin and Christer Bergstrom,
indicates it was generally accepted from
1941 to 1944 that the undersides, vertical
stabilizer and a portion of the fuselage
sides of dayfighterswere painted RLM-76,
often called Lichtblau. The topside cam-
ouflage on the wings, horizontal stabi-
lizers and top section of the fuselage
should be painted in a splinter pattern of
RLM-82, Dunkelgrün, and RLM-02, Grau.
The splinter pattern is accomplished by
first painting the appropriate areas with
Grau, and then masking it off and spray-
ing with dark green, RLM-82. The mot-
tling on the fuselage and vertical tau is
achieved by spraying with RLM-75,
Grauviolett, in irregular blotches. Note
that the camouflage pattern is illustrated
on the back of the kit box.
Mask and then paint the Me-210's
bomb bay RLM-02. When it's dry, glue
the bombs into place. Once all the paint-
ing is complete, spray a coat of gloss over
the entire model, so there's a smooth
surface for the decal markings to adhere
to. Note that the kit offers markings for
two aircraft, one for Zerstörergeschwader 2
and another—which I chose—from ZG.8,
from Sicily in 1942.
Paint the landing-gear struts RLM-02
and the wheels "tire black." Finally, mask
and paint the greenhouse, and then posi-
tion it in place using white glue.
Dick Smith
MARCH 2014 AVIATION HISTOBY 29
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