¹⁄35

First Jets

Final construction

First I glued the canopies in place with white glue. Then I dry fitted the fixed undercarriage of the He 178 and noticed the V struts (parts 14 and 17) were too long! So I reduced them and they finally fitted well, giving the plane the right sit. As I dry fitted the undercarriage of the Pioneer it was even worse! As everybody knows, the trend today is to hang the models on the ceiling or to show them while take off. It seems that Special Hobby chose to depict the undercarriage in full extension? For the few who want to show the plane on the ground, the only alternative is to shorten the front leg by 4mm and the main legs by 3mm (picture 14). Otherwise your Pioneer will look like a flamingo! After having glued the wheel door and the pitot tube, construction was finished. Needless to say that in my mind, the He 178 kit was far ahead now.

Decals and weathering

I said above that the kits were built out of the box. That's not totally accurate, as I cheated with the HEINKEL logo of the German plane. The Condor kit came with no decals at all, so I made my own by cutting a few letters from the decal sheet of a Hasegawa KI-61 Hien kit, which had almost all the letters needed in an acceptable scale (picture 15). The Pioneer markings gave me even more concern. I'm not an historian but didn't the British prototypes used to carry a beautiful yellow “P” in a circle? The decals provided by Special Hobby came with no “P” and they looked under scale, at least for the roundels of both the fuselage and the underside of the wings. I wouldn't bet my head on the fin flash either. Well, it was hard but I said to myself that the markings might have been an early version so I decided to use them out of the box. As I was applying them, I noticed they where slightly out of register. The white base layer was visible on some roundels and on the fin flash and I had to cut that out while they were wet.

After the decals episode it was time to weather the kits. I only applied diluted dark brown (glossy acrylic) in the panel lines with a very small brush and added some "scratches" here and there. I must say the Pioneer kit was far easier to weather because the panel lines were more crisply done. The panel lines of the He 178 weren't deep enough, at least in my opinion, and if I had to do it again I would re-scribe them first. At least, this was a positive aspect of the Special Hobby kit compared to the Condor one.

Conclusion

Overall, while not trouble free, the build of the first jets in aviation history wasn’t that difficult. Sure the kits are short run and the fit is not always perfect, but there are not many parts and the overall design of the real planes is quite basic! You don't have to deal with propellers, armament, bomb loads, aerial wires etc. only simply designed airframes.

Right, the finished models aren't 100% accurate! They both have their flaws, but at the end they make an acceptable representation of the real prototypes even build out of the box.
So who's the winner? I would say the final result is equal, but considering the Condor kit is 10 years older, it's a shame Special Hobby didn't take advantage of the better moulding quality of their kit. A "real" etched fret with some details for the cockpit would have been a plus. The designers of the kit could also have paid more attention to the details. They forgot an air scoop under the fuselage, which is clearly visible on the front cover, and there are more things like this. With a price three times higher than the Condor kit, I wouldn't pick up the Special Hobby one if I had to choose, but what would be a Heinkel He 178 without a Gloster Pioneer in a WW2 aircraft collection?