Gareth returns to GAR with tales of scale modelling, Meteors and some thoughts on aviation nostalgia and what the future might hold for GAR.

Well, it’s been a while! An absolute age to be honest. I was hugely privileged that Peter Barker entrusted me / GAR to put together and publish his father Noel’s incredible aviation life story recently, but prior to that the last feature we published was Rob’s NASA DC-8 retirement piece last May, and the last feature I actually wrote was one of those to mark the Puma’s retirement from RAF service last April. As I said, it’s been a while!

Please have a read of Noel Barker’s incredible story

 I make no apologies for that. The landscape looks very different now from when GAR came into being back in 2009, both in an aviation sense and of course in terms of where I, and my GAR friends and colleagues, find themselves. Life moves on and most of us find ourselves in very different places these days, be it geographically or in terms of work and well, life essentially! 

Having said that, this website continues to see more than its fair share of traffic. There are over 600 features here, to say nothing of our entire Global Aviation Magazine back catalogue and links to the original GAR website, although sadly that is far less functional than it used to be. Technology and the internet have come a long way! Six hundred features is a lot of words and a lot of imagery and we know that people continue to find them interesting, landing here from all sorts of places, be it search engines, social media or, quite often, other specialist aviation and hobby websites.

Some of these sites are dedicated to scale modelling, and there’s no doubt that GAR’s huge range of features, covering aircraft and aviation from so many different eras and genres, and the quality of imagery we have always strived to publish, is definitely of use to those of you building scale models.

All of which brings me neatly onto the next thing! In February of this year I underwent ankle surgery at the Orthopaedic Hospital here in Birmingham. It was planned, I knew what was being done and I knew I would be laid up for some time while everything recovered. I spent the first few weeks in plaster so was pretty much confined to either sofa or bed, and spent much of the time watching TV or on my PlayStation (I never thought I would be messing around on Flight Sim on a console, incidentally!), all of which got pretty boring, pretty quickly. Then Dunny (GAR’s Paul Dunn) sent me a WhatsApp message asking me for my address. 

A few days later the postman delivered a small parcel and inside was a 1/72 Airfix starter kit. It was a Spitfire of course, what else! I was touched at his thoughtfulness, extremely grateful and absolutely delighted at this act of kindness for Dunny knew a/ that model making was something I used to do but hadn’t done for years and years and b/ that I took an active interest in his own model making and maybe just needed a nudge to get myself started again. As his note said, this was something to do while recuperating and maybe it would be that trigger to pick up the hobby once again.

Well, it has done exactly that, and more! I built the Spitfire (see below) and presented this to my Grandson who, let’s be honest, constitutes a forgiving audience seeing as he is only five years old! Dunny and I started chatting re the state of the nation as much has changed in the modelling landscape with new manufacturers and products and I decided that 1/72 just wasn’t going to be feasible with my 53 year old eyes so 1/48 was definitely going to be the way forward. 

The starter kit that started it all!

The rest, as they say, is history. I have already completed an F-15C, almost completed an F-16C (I must finish this) and an A-10C (long story but this got damaged and needs some repair work) and also another, larger scale, Spitfire, this time completed as part of a diorama. This will be a surprise gift for someone when I see them in a couple of months. I’m not very good at making models, I don’t think, but it is incredibly enjoyable and really relaxing, especially when our lives are dominated so much by screens and devices and yes, there is irony here as I write this for our website and you read it on a computer or mobile, but you know what I mean! 

Much to Dunny’s amusement, I have also already built up a small ‘stash’ of kits which are waiting their turn to land on the workbench. The process of stash-building is seemingly inevitable and entirely unavoidable! This is especially true these days with the amount of product available online, with a host of stores (this isn’t an advert but shout out to Jadlam in particular for their huge range, great service and fun ‘eBay Live’ stash building sessions!) selling all the new kits and accessories. Then of course come the likes of eBay and even Vinted for your private sellers and, if you want them, perhaps older and slightly more obscure kits. If you want that vintage Matchbox Sea Harrier you built 40 years ago, you can probably find it! 

The box art was always superb!

Like many hobbies, scale modelling is not cheap, but neither does it need to be prohibitively costly. The quality and detail on new kits these days is absolutely superb and, while I have now learned of new brands like Meng and Magic Factory, most of the classics are still out there – names you will probably recognise, like Revell, Tamiya, Eduard, Hasegawa and of course, Airfix. 

Airfix has really upped its game, of that there is no doubt. I had already heard great things about their newer products and had seen the excitement as the 2026 line-up was announced, and I knew that Dunny had built some of them for himself. I now know this to be true from personal experience. A few weeks ago I had an idea and said to Dunny, let’s pick a budget and a criteria and buy each other a surprise kit. In the spirit of Secret Santa (Secret Stasha, for us!) this was an opportunity, ideally, to get something that the other person has never built (much harder when buying for Dunny!) but maybe also something they hadn’t considered building or that would push them out of their comfort zone (pretty easy in my case!). 

We went with £30 and post-World War II, a straightforward, hugely broad criteria to start with! Having ascertained that Dunny was not a frequent modeller of helicopters, I decided to go down that route and wanted to get something with some character and a potential story behind it, which we both enjoy. 

This is what I purchased and sent to Dunny and I can’t wait to see how it turns out. Spoiler alert – apparently it is pretty fiddly! 

c/o Sprue Brothers Models – https://spruebrothers.com/

Much to my delight, when my package from Dunny arrived I opened it to find an Airfix Meteor F.8. Not only is this one of the newer kits from the brand but, and Dunny genuinely didn’t know this, my late Uncle was an Air Wireless Mechanic on the Meteor Mk.4 with 66 Squadron at RAF Duxford in 1948 / 49! Dunny explained that he wanted me to experience a ‘new’ Airfix kit for myself and that he hoped I would give the all-aluminium paint scheme (High Speed Silver as the RAF called it) a try – which I have! 

Airfix Meteor – nice box art!

Like my Dad, his older brother enjoyed his National Service in the Royal Air Force and retained a keen interest in aviation and aviation history for ever more. Over the years I have been entrusted with some of his memories of the Meteor and his time in the RAF and this seemed like a good time to dig them out and have a look at them once again. 

They include records and research into the aircraft, like this enlargement from a copy of Aviation News dated September 1981!

And this, correspondence with the Ministry of Defence / Air Historical Branch re 66 Squadron, dated December 1983.

 

It’s all great stuff, which must be preserved for future generations, and in some ways this brings us full circle to the beginning of this blog. 

All we at GAR have done when producing these hundreds of articles, and anyone else engaged in similar activity is obviously doing this too, is to preserve information online, for eternity, we hope! I know it is the easiest thing in the world to say that everything was better back in the good old days and I know that to anyone of a certain age that will make me sound like some sort of grumpy old man, but when I see that RIAT has been cancelled, the Red Arrows are down to seven aircraft, how small the airshow calendar is, aircraft being retired from service and how few military types there are these days, well I guess I am a grumpy old man then! 

In the absence of ‘new’ features on GAR, for the past eighteen months or so I have been keeping our Facebook page active by simply posting images from my archive. Some of these are ‘newer’, i.e from the last ten years or so, but many are from the mid to late 1980’s and guess what, people love them! They love seeing the different types from the different shows and bases, and, much like remembering those Airfix and Matchbox kits you built 30 or 40 years ago, it feeds a certain nostalgia that really seems to resonate with aviation enthusiasts, no doubt fuelled by the dwindling opportunities to experience it in person these days.

Maybe, and I am thinking out loud here, this is where we go with Global Aviation Resource?

We won’t be news-driven any more, that much is clear. We aren’t chasing around the world these days looking for breaking stories or exclusives, and let’s face it, are you really interested that yet another nation has taken delivery of its first F-35?

What we do have though is access to years, and I mean years, of aviation experiences and memories, and the visual memories to go with them. There is still so much that can be shared and so many stories to tell. Should we take our time building content for you, just like building a model aircraft, and focus entirely on the aviation scene that was, not the aviation scene that is? As ever, the secret to making this succeed is finding a way to do this that stands out, for this is not an exclusive opportunity for GAR.

It’s all food for thought and I must once again thank Dunny – for not only has he kick-started a hobby that I find hugely beneficial and enjoyable, I think he might have lit a nostalgia fire in me for GAR as well!

As a post-script, he also suggested I pay the gesture forward, which was a brilliant idea.

I purchased two 1/72 Airfix starter kits, a Mustang and a Hurricane, and posted them to GAR’s Chris Wood and Rob Edgcumbe. Woody hasn’t built anything since the 1970’s, but has an extraordinary stash of kits in his loft (see below!) and is passing his starter kit on to a young family friend who is keen on joining the RAF, which is perfect. I think Rob is going to build his, but we await further news! 

Woody sent me this from his stash. I will build it, I promise!

If you can think of anyone who might benefit from a similar gesture, let us know in the comments! 

In the meantime, thanks for reading and, see you soon. Certainly much sooner than last time, I hope!

Gareth 

PS I will show you the finished Meteor, but Dunny and I have agreed to reveal our builds when we have both finished them!