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NC-900 Normandie-Niemen Squadron

Posted: November 22nd, 2017, 10:06 pm
by Spaceowl
What's one of those, you may ask? It's one of these:

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Otherwise known as a FW190-A5 (more or less). In 1945, France was in need of an air force and quickly, so it took some captured Luftwaffe stock onto its strength. These FW-190s were found in bits in 1944 when the main FW-190 repair station for the Western Front was overrun, and along with some captured DB801 engines, were combined to make the NC-900, the first native-produced aircraft in the French Air Force since 1940.
Wings and fuselages of several different types of FW190 (mainly A-5,A-6 and F-8) were combined to make these aircraft, and as quite a lot of the spare parts used in them had been sabotaged by French workers during the war, and of course were the remains of aircraft that had already been damaged, they were far from popular. Of the 200+ planned, only 62 were built and only one squadron was issued with them: Normandie-Niemen, who were starting to suffer spare parts attrition with their Yaks and were glad of anything they could get their hands on. As such you get the odd sight of two former deadly enemies sharing a flight line in the same squadron, if only briefly, like this:

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Notes: The kit was a reboxing of the Admiral FW-190A-5, and left to my own devices I would have thrown in the kit and just used the decal sheet on a better FW-190 kit, which is just about all of them. However, I'm not paying fifteen quid for a decal sheet just yet (I do come from Yorkshire) so I persevered and built the damn thing. I won't go into details on the build, I'll just add that there is a choice in FW-190s on the market and this probably isn't it. Still, it does look nice next to the Yak, doesn't it?

Re: NC-900 Normandie-Niemen Squadron

Posted: November 22nd, 2017, 10:13 pm
by iggie
I admire your reticence in not describing your ordeal in gory detail! :-D
It does look like a 190, that has to be said and nice to see an unusual scheme

Re: NC-900 Normandie-Niemen Squadron

Posted: November 27th, 2017, 9:56 am
by Spaceowl
iggie wrote:I admire your reticence in not describing your ordeal in gory detail! :-D
We've all made one of those Czech kits from the 'knocked together in a garage' days. It's interesting to see how far they've come.

Glad you liked the build; it's an interesting aircraft from a difficult time for the French Air Force.

Re: NC-900 Normandie-Niemen Squadron

Posted: November 27th, 2017, 10:25 am
by DazDaMan
You don't see one of those very often!

Re: NC-900 Normandie-Niemen Squadron

Posted: November 27th, 2017, 7:07 pm
by Lone Modeller
I knew nothing about the French Air Force in 1945 - obvious really that they would use whatever was to hand until they could be equipped with something better. Very interesting story and two good models there - in spite of the battle you had to get it into shape.

Re: NC-900 Normandie-Niemen Squadron

Posted: November 28th, 2017, 7:27 am
by skypirate
Nice choice of subject!

Cheers,

David