1/72 Special Hobby Flettner Fl265

Gallery Article by Santiago Duarte on Dec 4 2013

 

 

This is my Flettner FL-263 kit, a WWII German rotorcraft, in 1/72 scale from Special Hobby, it’s a mixed plastic & resin kit, but all its parts fits well. It also comes with a nice cockpit detail, but I think than in a bigger scale, like its similar kit but in 1/48 scale, that I saw in many websites around, there's could be a little more easy to catch more detailing perfection.

For instance, a difference with the 1/48 kit is the absent in the body of the upper window or the possibility to build it with one open door, so I had to scratch and drill it with caution in order that when I finished, it could be more accurate with the real one, and have more light and visibility in its interior. Besides one option (recommended by SH) to paint its interior as brown leather, I prefer to use a RLM70 “Schwarzgrün” color, detailed as very similar with the interior color used of this kind of German WWII coaxial rotorcrafts, with the recommended gray, little lighted for the exterior.

With the usual reference by the web, I think that I did an acceptable job, even adding a little bucket in one side of the door to carry a tiny aerial map, as I saw some modeler did in one 1/48 kit.

 

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History:
"The Fl 265 VI, D-EFLV, made its first flight in May 1939, and its first autorotative descents were made the following August, but this machine was eventually destroyed in flight when the rotor blades struck each other. Because of this accident, the Fl 265 V2 was the first to be used in a series of naval trials in the Baltic and Mediterranean in which Fl 265s operated from platforms fitted to cruisers and even made landings on U-boat decks. Despite the fact that one Fl 265 was lost due to its refueling being overlooked, the trials were a great success and augured well for the machine's place in naval reconnaissance and anti-submarine work. Other roles were also evaluated when an Fl 265 was used in exercises with Wehrmacht troops and performed such work as towing dinghies across a river and lifting bridge sections during construction. 

The outcome of all these successes was that Flettner received instructions in 1940 to proceed with quantity production of the Fl 265, but, by that time, the design of a more advanced two-seat derivative of the Fl 265, the Fl 282 had been completed and the program was switched to the new type. Thus, only the six prototypes of the Fl 265 were completed. 

Santiago Duarte

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Photos and text © by Santiago Duarte (History by  J.R.Smith, Antony L. Kay "German Aircraft of the Second World War", 1972)