The material in the history pages of the kit is what really triggered me reworking this model:
On the first of these six pages (above) the subject of Jewish
Haganah aircraft is introduced, including a full list of all VQ-P registered aircraft (denoting British Protectorate of Palestine; see
Air History: Israel/Palestine VQ-P 1930-48).
The close-up of the pilot in his cockpit shows the full instrument panel also in the rear seat, and the fold-up flap in the right wing root. On this page there is also a clickable link included in the pdf-kit to the film clip already referred to.
The second page above is filled with some very rare photos from the flying school at Kibbutz Afikim. They are taken by Naftali Oppenheim, who most likely also shot the film clip from which many stills of the RWD-8 seem to be taken. He was one of the founder of the Kibbutz Ein Gev (”Wall and Tower”) in 1937, and continued to document the Hebrew construction works in the Jordan valley during the entire 1930s and ‘40s.
See this article in Hebrew (translated version): "
The first pilot course in Israel". If your interest is peaked by it, see also
Naftali Oppenheim's photos from the construction works during the 1930-40s in the Jordan valley (translated version).
The photos above were very valuable to identify & corroborate details not shown previously on any drawing.
The same goes for the photos above of members of the first pilot class of the Haganah flying school at Afikim. Several details identified here were added to (or subtracted from) the kit.
A good source for the history of
Polish RWD aircraft in Palestine is Jewish.org.pl, a Jewish Polish organization (translated version). Photos like these can also be found at
the Israeli government Flickr photo stream. Samoloty Polskie has an excellent section on "
RWD in Palestine and Israel" (translated version).
On this page (above) you get a condensed version of the Aviron Aviation Company, the first Jewish aviation company in Palestine. Pilots for this company were trained at the Afikim flying school. See also "
Aviron is founded", at the Israeli Air Force website.
The last of the history pages (above) is very special. It tells the intriguing life story of "Jenka" (Yevgeni or Gideon) Ratner, a young Jewish emigrant from Russia who learnt to fly at the Haganah flying school, then became a Haganah special operations bombmaker; later on a bomb designer for the British during WWII; and still later the head of the secret group who managed to create an Israeli nuclear weapon.
His confident smile in the photo above would soon turn into tears as one of his bombs unintendedly will sink a refugeeship in Haifa harbor. The intended purpose was to stop the British authorities from deporting these Jewish refugees from Europe to Mauritius. Which in turn is only one small part of the tragic and conflict-ridden history of this part of the world.
For an Hebrew source of Jenka Ratner (translated), see
this entry of the Hebrew Wikipedia. For an account of how the Israeli nuclear bomb came about, see the Google book excerpt from "
The Bomb in the Basement: How Israel Went Nuclear" by Michael Karpin. For the large photo of Jenka with the VQ-PAK modeled here, see
Wikimedia Commons. Note that the date given in the family album probably is off; in the kit I argue it must be from 1937 at the earliest, since that is when the VQ-PAK was registered.