You may well ask..........

Those of you 'of a certain age', and probably British, may remember a TV series called 'The Planemakers' in the mid '60s which was really about 'Big Business' and industrial relations, but also featured a couple of rather outlandish 'aircraft'. The fictional company involved was called Scott Furlong, and the first of their aircraft to feature was the Sovereign, a short-medium range airliner in the Trident-727-DC9 mould. Very few pics of it are available, this one being maybe the best, and I really MUST build a model of it one day. I love those outward retracting mainwheels, surely modelled after the Valiant.


Although I watched the series avidly back then I'm darned if I can remember what happened to the Sovereign, whether it sold in thousands or fell by the wayside, but later on Scott Furlong bought out another company, Ryan Airframe, who were developing a 2-seat, supersonic, VTOL fighter, which Scott Furlong continued with, and this was the Predator.

I'm not at all sure if a real, mobile, Sovereign existed, but the Predator surely did, and it could even move under it's own power! OK, so it was only a 500 cc motorcycle engine, but move it did, and the whole thing was remarkably realistic, albeit a trifle impractical as it would have just got the airfield boundary before it ran out of fuel, maybe..........
As it had one socking great forward propulsion engine, and eight vertical lift engines, its fuel consumption would likely have been astronomical, and it may have needed a tanker before it reached the runway threshold!

Anyway, returning to modelling, at the last Telford event in 2019 Joe Cherrie presented me with two pre-production moulds of his resin Predator, and after taking them home I promptly lost them. (Dead easy in my chaotic house I can assure you) But last week I found them again.

So here we go on a Whiffed Whiff build, as I'm going to build the Predator GR3, the later version as used by many RAF Squadrons in the 70s for close air support tasks, a bit like their Harriers in the RW.
Yeah, right.....


These are the kit components, not very many of them as with many resin kits, and this one needs some fettling due to its pre-production status. It comes with resin landing gear, and I'm not a fan of such things as they're either too brittle and snap off, or they soften under the weight of the model. Mine will probably end up with some gear salvaged from a Harrier GR3 or 5 kit, as they're about the same size and look reasonable, plus I have a lot of both types in The Loft.