I am almost sure that when you hear "Polish" and "Tu-154M" you think about the crash of the plane with the President of Poland and 95 other people on board near Smolensk on 10th April 2010. Till that day Polish government was the owner of two machines of this type with the individual numbers 101 and 102. The 101 has crashed, 102 is still in service and by the time when this article is being published it comes back to Poland from the general repair in Samara, Russia. "101" (serial number 90A-837) was in polish service since 1990 year followed by "102" (serial number 90A-862) 4 years later. This set allows us to add a replica of one of these planes to our collection.

The set is designed to be used with the Zvezda kit. I do not know if anybody else makes this machine in scale, but I doubt it. The ModelWorld set contains a large glossy sheet of painting masks and two small sheets of matt decals. The decals include everything visible in this scale stencils and service markings on one sheet and on the other Polish chessboards, individual numbers and Polish national emblems. The painting masks sheet contains masks for the windshield and fuselage windows together with the red stripes painted on the fuselage, engines nacelles and the vertical tail. Unfortunately the producer did not provide any instruction for placing masks or decals so before you start work with this set you have to study very carefully all the possible pictures of the real planes and use some imagination how to place the the masks. As far as I see the masks are designed for masking red stripes which means that you have to paint red first, mask proper areas and then paint white. I am a bit afraid of painting white over red but I do not want to spread a bad prophecy, I just never tried this kind of trick yet.

The masking paper seems very similar to those used in other set of masks (MIG-29UB) from this producer. It is thin with a rather strong glue so it is adviced to weaken it a bit before placing on the model unless you want to remove the mask together with the paint...

Conclusion

Well, the set from ModelWorld fills another niche on the market and gives you the chance to add to your collection an interesting model of the plane which became so famous in a very tragic way. Even with the mentioned nuisances it can be used almost by everybody, not only experienced modelers. Zvezda kit is rather easy-going with no major problems of fitting so all what is needed extra from the modeler is a bit of patience and some references, but these can be easily found in the internet.

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