Valom – 72129 – DH.91 Albatross (RAF)

Description:

DH.91 Albatross (RAF)

Unassembled plastic model kit in 1/72 scale of a de Havilland Albatross mail/transport aircraft of the late 30s.

A total of seven aircrafts were built, the first two as mailplanes and the remaining 5 as passengers aircrafts. Initially all of them were operated by Imperial Airways (Later reorganized as British Overseas Airways Corporation, BOAC) but in 1940 RAF pressed into service the two mailplanes, to cover the route with Iceland. The two aircrafts were the Faraday and Franklin and both ended their days crashing at landing in Reykjavik, in 1941 and 1942 respectively.

Valom has included in this kit markings for Fortuna and Fiona planes, but these seems to be wrong to us since they never were RAF operated. In addition to this decals mistake, mailplane variants had a different arrange of windows, but same fuselage used for airliners has been delivered here by Valom, so in our opinion this model doesn’t depict the RAF operated DH.91 Albatross.

For a real conversion to mailplane, check this excellent work by GrahamB at Britmodeller forum.