Hi Guys,
After a ten or more year break my son AJ has finally persuaded me to start building 1/72 scale model aircraft again and I am starting with a mixture of Russian, French and Italian to replace old kits I threw away. I need to pick your brains on propellor tip markings for these 3 countries!
I am pretty sure that British and American planes with black coloured propellors had yellow tips, perhaps to try and warn people from walking into the revolving blades? Likewise Japanese planes with either black or brown coloured props also seem to generally had yellow tips whilst the earlier US and Jap planes with silver blades seem to have had a mixture or thin red stripes or in the case of the USN red yellow and blue. The Luftwaffe, contrary to the early Airix instructions, do not seem to have had yellow tips at all.
Getting back to the enquiry I have lots of B/W photos of Russian, French and Italian aircraft, but given the limitations of the film at that time it is not easy to be absolutely certain. It looks like few if any Russian aircraft had yellow tips (I am deliberately excluding Lend-Lease planes here) about 20% of French planes seem to have had yellow tips, and perhaps 30% of Italian.
What I need is any relevant information you have and in particular I need to know if there is a pattern based on particular aircraft types, or perhaps theatre of operations or date. For example the Airfix Fiat G50 has a silver prop with no tip markings, but the Frog Mc202 and Italeri Mc205 both have black blades with yellow tips, whilst the Airfix IL2M has plain black blades but their Pe-2 not only has yellow tips to the black blades but also has a wide red stripe inboard of the yellow.
Any information will be most useful.
Cheers,
Pete
Edited by PeterMBooth (04/21/12 02:11 PM)
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With increasing age should come wisdom and tolerance, but as the saying goes, "there is no fool like an old fool" as I prove regularly!
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