Now that the Santa Fe postal service has finally decided to allow this package into my possesion I must say that I am delighted to open up the incredibly well-packaged envelope to find a 1901 penny, a very nice GPM F-82 Twin Mustang and the Maly Spitfire.
The good news is that it's a Spit, one of my fav's and I'm sure one that many others also admire. From looking at the model instructions and doing some internet searching, I was able to discern that it was flown by G.R. Duval with the 152 "Black Panther" squadron during 1943-1944 somewhere in India or Burma. So it's a pretty interesting subject. The 152 squadron has a very extensive web site at:
http://www.152hyderabad.co.uk/index.htm That's where I found the pics of W/O Duval and the squadron mascot "Pooch".
The bad news is that the colors are pretty far off as is the color registration on medium blue and yellow. If you look closely even in the attached thumbnails you can see white crescents in the insignia roundels.
So what to do, what to do? My current plan is to build it without cockpit interior and with as few mods as possible to the original kit. Then if it actually goes together, and I still like it enough I may try to re-color it and build it as a 1/48 scale model. Right now I see the potential for a very nice and somewhat accurate build.
But who knows for sure, I'm probably just dreaming here.
Cecil