Part 1: First Look

MSRP: $27.00 Available through Dragon USA- www.dragonmodelsusa.com . The Do335B long-wing family inhabits the hinterland between actual historical aircraft of the Third Reich, and the fanciful theoretical machines of the "Luftwaffe 1946" set (designed but never produced during the Second World War). I have conflicting information as to whether Dornier (or their production partner for the Do335, Heinkel) ever got a prototype built of the Pfeil with extended wings. Some sources say it was built; some say it never made it off the drawing table. In my planning for this build, I spent a considerable length of time trying to find a definitive answer-and never did. The Dragon kit is mostly a single-seater Pfeil with the extended wing parts; it could be built as an extended wing example or a standard wing sub-type (say, an A-0 preproduction version or an A-4 recon). As the Dragon Do335 family is based on modular components, somebody could mount the extended wing on one of the night-fighter (resulting in the B-7 variant) or trainer (B-5) versions of the Pfeil, or get the wing weapon bay parts for the B-2 zerstorer version and add them to this one to produce one of the likely B-4 Hohenjager configurations. But the intention of this kit is to model a long-wing derivative of the A-4 reconnaissance Pfeil, which was actually built and nearly ready for operations when the War ended. There are 122 parts to this model, of which 12 are photoetch steel or brass. The brass disks are to replicate the camera ports set under the fuselage beneath the wing roots and main fuel tank. Aside from a sprue with five clear parts, the plastic parts are molded in light gray. Before even opening a poly bag to get at the parts, I had a problem…on the instruction sheet. Dragon must have copied much of the information from a previous release and sent it to print without checking it first. The paints tally shows one paint that doesn't seem to be needed in this build anywhere (RLM 65 Light Blue) and excludes the most important paint of the camouflage scheme (RLM 75 Purple Gray). The fact that I had to devote more than the usual length of time to researching this build forced me to find this error and work around it. Not a big problem but to the casual builder, it might cause some confusion. More to Come…

Information, images, and all other items placed electronically on this site are the intellectual property of IPMS/USA ®.