Over nearly half a century, Willy Messerschmitt designed a remarkable array of aircraft

By Stephan Wilkinson

The career of Germanys most famous airplane designer nearly

sputtered out before it took off. Willy Messerschmitt (only

his mother called him Wilhelm) began as a builder of stone-

simple postWorld War I gliders, then moved on to powered

sailplanes with what would today be considered riding-mower

en gines. A series of light sport planes followed, and during the late

1920s and early 30s Messerschmitt designed several successful

four- to 12-seat airliners. In 1935, thanks to such a modest avia-

tion background, Third Reich offcials told him to not even bother

competing against Germanys major manufacturers for the con-

tract to build the Luftwaffes new air-superiority fghter.

Messerschmitt tested just how small his chances were by quietly

putting out word that he was considering

leaving the industry and accepting a profes-

sorship at Danzig Technical University. He

was then encouraged by the Reichsluft fahrt

ministeriumthe RLM, the bureaucracy

that controlled all aviation in Nazi Ger-

manyto hurry up and accept the job,

because his work as an airplane designer

was of no importance. Talk about dis-

couraging words

But they didnt discourage Willy Messer-

schmitt. On his frst try at gaining a real

military contract, he produced the Bf-109,

the most revolutionary and effective fghter

of its day. Spitfre advocates will argue

that point endlessly, but nobody can deny

it was an accomplishment akin to Clyde

Cessna turning out the P-51 after a lifetime

of lightplanes. Messerschmitt had one advantage over his competi-

tors: Since the RLM initially didnt consider him part of the formal

competition, he could design as he wished rather than having to

stay within the parameters stipulated by the aviation ministry. The

result was the Bf-109the smallest, simplest and lightest possible

airframe that could be wrapped around one pilot, the requisite

armament and a large and powerful V12 engine.

The Bf-109 was by no stretch of the imagination an up-engined

Bf-108, though the family resemblance between the two is strong.

What the 109 did take from its family-sedan precursor was Willys

extreme emphasis on simple, modular construction with major

forces concentrated at a few points on the airframe, such as the

sturdy engine mount suspended from the

frewall, where landing-gear loads were also

localized. Bf/Me-109s could be built in

4,000 to 6,000 man-hours, depending on

the year of manufacture, while it took two

or three times as long to build a complex,

largely hand-wrought Spitfre or Hurricane.

Willy went on to create a second game-

changer, and he did it while the world was

collapsing around him, his factories bat-

tered by Allied bombers. American and

British fghters by this time were superior to

even the best of his 109 versions. Yet while

the Yanks and Brits struggled to create a

few lumpish proto-jets, few of which ever

made it into limited combat, Messerschmitt

directed the design and engineering of the

Me-262, and his company produced more

22 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY MARCH 2014

Wilhelm Willy Messerschmitt in 1938.

sueddeutsche zeitung/alamy

Black 2, a Messerschmitt Me-109G-10

converted from a Spanish-built Hispano-

engine version, sports the markings of

Luftwaffe ace Friedrich-Karl Mller.

joHn M

. diBBS/tHe pLane picture co.

24 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY MARCH 2014

than 1,400 of the twin-engine jets, 300 of which saw action.

Think of that: While the U.S. and Britain were still experiment-

ing, a nation that had already lost the war managed to produce

an effective operational jet fghter 100 mph faster than the Allied

fghters that opposed it, thanks to Willy Messerschmitt and the

team of engineers he had gathered. (To be fair, no legendary air-

craft designer ever created a complex, high-performance airplane

on his own. Robert Lusser, Messerschmitts project offce director,

and Richard Bauer, chief design engineer, had a great deal to do

with the design of the Bf-109; and engineers Wolfgang Degel, Karl

Althoff and Rudolf Seitz were crucial to the development of the

Me-262, a project directed by Waldemar Voigt because Lusser had

been hired away by Willys archenemy Ernst Heinkel.)

And lets not belittle Messerschmitts lightplanes. In 1934 he cre-

ated a four-seat personal aircraft, the Bf-108

Taifun, that would only see its equal in per-

formance and effciency when the Beech

Bonanza was introduced in 1947. There are

Taifun owners todaythe design stayed

in production with the French Nord com-

pany into the 1960swho wouldnt trade

their rides for any single-engine spamcan

yet produced.

Willy got his own private pilots license

in 1929, which wasnt an occasion for uni-

versal delight. Fritz Hille, sales director of

the company for which Willy worked,

Bayerische Flugzeugwerk, went public with the claim that Messer-

schmitts new fying hobby was an irresponsible distraction from

his duties as developmental head of the frm. Hille then resigned,

blaming Messerschmitt for a variety of fnancial problems that BFW

was experiencingthe company was close to bankruptcyand im-

mediately went to work for Heinkel, making it clear that the whole

ploy was an attempt to discredit BFW.

As a pilot, Messerschmitt was no Kurt Tank, the famous Focke-

Wulf designer who was as skilled a test pilot as he was an engineer

(and who had worked for Willy in the early 1930s). Messerschmitt

had his own Bf-108, though he only few it with a company pilot in

the right seat. On one fight, he announced that he wanted to fy the

whole leg on his own, with the copilot acting solely as a silent safety

pilot. Messerschmitt forgot to retract the Taifuns landing gear after

takeoff and few the whole distance with the gear down. To Willys

embarrassment, his copilot, per orders, never said a word.

Messerschmitt went on to direct the design of a surprisingly var-

ied assortment of aircraft, including the Me-209, which held the

world piston-engine speed record until 1969; a four-engine Me-264

Amerika Bomber (a planned six-engine version never few, nor

did the sweptwing version with auxiliary turbojet engines); the

worlds frst swing-wing jet, the P.1101 prototype, model for the

U.S. Air Forces Bell X-5; and a massive cargo glider that in its

powered form was the C-5 of its day, the Me-321/323. The one

Messerschmitt that Willy had little to do with was the Me-163

rocket plane, a product of Alexander Lippischs fevered brain.

Messerschmitt in fact wanted to redesign it as the Me-334, with

a Daimler-Benz 605 V12 and pusher prop in place of the danger-

ous, barely controllable bomb that Lippisch had placed in its tail

(Messerschmitt engineers called it the Flying Firecracker).

It all started when 15-year-old Messerschmitt apprenticed

himself to German glider pioneer Friedrich Harth just before

World War I. Since gliding was the only way to train a cadre

of future Luftwaffe pilots without openly fouting the pro-

visions of the Versailles Treaty, the sport became particularly

impor tant in Germany in the 1920s, by which time Messerschmitt

was improving Harths designs and increasingly working on his

own. (Germany was so glider-savvy that the Luftwaffe developed

the concept of troop-carrying gliders, frst used in combat in

May 1940, during a stunningly successful glider assault on the

impregnable Belgian Fort Eben-Emael. Even today, German

Messerschmitts frst designs were sailplanes such as the s 10, shown fying in 1922.

Messerschmitt stands in front of his Bristol cherubpowered Motorfugzeug M 17, now on display at Munichs deutsches Museum.

photos: eads corporate heritage

MARCH 2014 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY 25

competition sailplanes reign supreme.)

Willy had a lot to learn. His frst few designs were controlled by

pivoting the entire wing from a joint above the minimal fuselage

part wing-warping, part angle-of-attack shifting, a concept hed

learned from Harth, who called it wing control. There were no

other movable control surfaces, just a trimmable tailplane. Even

when Messerschmitt built his frst powered airplane, in 1924the

S 15, basically a motorgliderhe still resorted to wing-warping

for lateral control, though at least now the wing was fxed and the

airplane had an elevator.

His next design, the S 16, looked like a real airplane rather than a

spindly single-seat glider, and it had normal ailerons, a rudder, an

elevator, wheeled landing gear and a passenger seat. Willy was done

not only with Harths wing-control concept but also with unpow-

ered fight, other than the aberrant World War II Me-321 Gigant.

In 1924 Messerschmitt founded his own company. He continued

his and Harths model num-

bering se quence, but the

designator S (Segelfugzeug,

or sailplane) became an M

(Motorfugzeug, or motor-

plane). The S 16 was fol-

lowed by the M 17. That

sequence ended with the

sole 1934 M 35a six-seat,

single-engine passenger car-

rier built for a Romanian

airline. At that point Adolf

Hitlers RLM began assign-

ing designators and model

numbers to Germanys

various manufacturers, so

Messerschmitts next design

necessarily became the

Bf-108Bf because Willy

Messerschmitt was now

design director of Bayerische

Flugzeugwerke.

This eventually became

the excuse for an endlessly

argued piece of Messerschmitt trivia: Is Willys fghter a Bf-109 or

an Me-109? Reasonable historians say its both, depending on the

variant. By 1938, Messerschmitt quietly controlled enough of

BFWs stock that the company made him its managing director

and chairman of the board. The 109 and its designer had become so

well known that Bayerische rode his coattails by renaming itself

Messerschmitt AG. As a result, aircraft designed and de veloped by

Bayerische are properly designated Bfs, and those birthed by suc-

cessor Messerschmitt AG can be considered Mes. Which means the

A through D models of the 109 are Bf-109s, and the E through Z

models are Me-109s. (Yes, there was an Me-109Za twin-fuselage,

F-82-like variant that was built but never fown.) This is also the

opinion of the historical offce of todays German air force.

Others claim all 109s are Bfs and that theres no such thing

as an Me-109. Yet if you ask any air-minded U.S. WWII vet to

name the airplane, to a man theyll say, Its a Messerschmitt

an Me-109. Which gave rise

to that hoariest of aviation

jokesthe one that comes in

many varieties but always has

as its punch line Those fokkers

were Messerschmitts.

How, exactly, did an

aero nautical engineer

become powerful

enough to buy the

company he worked for? After

all, Kelly Johnson never bought

Lockheed, nor did Ed Heine-

mann ever come close to taking

over Douglas. But Willy Mes-

ser schmitt found himself a rich

sponsorand roommate. At

the time when BFW was in

fnancial trouble, he had met

and fallen for the Baroness Lilly

von Michel-Raulino Stromeyer,

the daughter of a wealthy Ba var-

ian family. She was smart and

charles Lindbergh examines the cockpit of a Bf-109 during an

interwar visit to the Messerschmitt plant in Augsburg, Bavaria.

despite a family resemblance, the Bf-108 shared very few design features with its groundbreaking successor, the Bf-109 fghter.

sdasm/alamy

interfoto/alamy

26 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY MARCH 2014

beautiful, but she was seven

years older than Willy and

already married, to fn ancier

Otto Stromeyer.

Nevertheless, Willy asked

Lilly for help, and she per-

suaded her husband to buy

an 87.5-percent share of

BFW; Messerschmitt owned

the remaining 12.5 percent

of the stock. The more they

saw of each other, the more

Lilly became fascinated by

the daring, dashing young

engineer. He was distinguished-looking,

in a dark-eyed, sharp-featured, professo-

rial way. And above all, he was a vivid

contrast to her boring, stuffy husband.

Inevitably, the baroness and the engineer

began an affair.

They went about it quite openly, which

was shocking to the cackling busybodies,

as one Messerschmitt biography put it, of

Catholic Bavaria. To say nothing of the fact that Otto Stromeyer

was the chairman of Messerschmitts board, of which Willy had

become a member. But never mind, that was Willys waythe

hell with convention, with the ordinary way of doing things

and the baroness was equally bold. Independently wealthy, she

soon divorced her husband, took control of her own share of the

Stromeyer Messerschmitt stock and moved in with Willy, though

they werent married until 1952.

Throughout a large part of his career, Willy Messerschmitt had

one implacable and powerful enemy: Erhard Milch, a bureaucrat

who became head of the RLM and ultimately a Luftwaffe General

feldmarschall. Their bad blood extended back to the late 1920s,

when Milch was managing director of the airline Luft Hansa.

Messerschmitt designed and built for Luft Hansa a single-engine,

10-passenger airliner with a large but lightweight cantilever, single-

spar wingthe M 20. Its payload as a percentage of gross weight

was remarkable, and its huge 500-hp BMW V12 en gine could be

run at very low power settings in cruise, for economy.

Unfortunately, the frst M 20 crashed as a result of some trailing-

edge wing fabric tearing loose during a landing approach, which

caused Luft Hansas chief test pilot, Hans Hackmack, to panic and

jump out only 250 feet above the ground. His parachute

never deployed, and he was killed. It was later deter-

mined that if hed simply continued the landing, all would

have ended well. Hackmack was a close friend of Erhard

Milchs, and Milch never forgave Messerschmitt for react-

ing coldly to the pilots death. As far as Willy was concerned,

Hackmack had screwed up and destroyed his airplane. Milch

thereafter thwarted Messerschmitt every chance he got, cancel-

ing contracts and projects, removing RLM subsidies and openly

favoring other manufacturers. In Milchs defense, Messerschmitt

seemed unlovable to others as well; he and Ernst Heinkel loathed

each otherHeinkel considered him a glider-builder, not a legiti-

mate warplane designerand Willy parted ways with pioneering

designer Alexander Lippisch during development of the Me-163.

Willy wasnt perfect as a designer. He has often been accused of

building fimsy airplanes that crashed, but only by people who con-

fuse lightness with fimsiness. Some of his aircraft did crash, most

notably that Luft Hansa M 20, which also suffered two weather-

related fatal crashes in airline service (though Milch blamed Mes-

serschmitts design for the second of them, claiming the speci fed

gross weight resulted in an overload). But Messerschmitts record

was no worse than those of other designers of the time.

Landing-gear design, however, was a challenge that Messer-

schmitt never quite conquered. In 1931 he invented single-strut

landing geara simple tubular strut housing the entire shock-

absorbing mechanism with few moving parts, a concept that soon

became common. But a number of his

airplanes suffered landing-gear col-

lapses, and the problems created by the

narrow, knock-kneed, diffcult-to-align

main gear on the 109 have been amply

discussed. The original Me-262 proto-

types had conventional tailwheel gear,

requiring a delicate tap on the brakes

during the takeoff run to get the tail off

the ground. When Messerschmitt as a

result added a tricycle-gear nosewheel, it

often collapsed.

national archives; inset: interfoto/a

lamy

Future Luftwaffe inspector General Erhard Milch (left)

became Messerschmitts enemy due to the crash of the

BFW M 20 (above), which killed pilot Hans Hackmack.

the dangerously unstable Me-210, Messerschmitts worst design, damaged his reputation.

national archives

MARCH 2014 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY 27

Messerschmitts worst blunder, however, was the Me-210. The

109 is easily the most famous German airplane ever to fy, but the

210 has been called the worst single airplane Germany ever devel-

oped. Willy was asked by the RLM to quickly turn the Me-110 into

a dive bomber, since the Junkers Ju-87 Stuka was growing long in

the tooth and the 110 wasnt having much success as a twin-engine

fghter/bomber-destroyer. Messerschmitt, as was his wont, did as

he wished and instead developed a totally new airplane that turned

out to have dangerous stability problems. The Me-210 was laterally

unpredictable, and since its propellers were unusually far ahead of

the center of gravity, this could have been longitudinally destabi-

lizing, particularly if power was suddenly added during a too-low

landing approach.

Thanks to many accidents, including landing-gear collapses

while taxiing, the Me-210 was adjudged useless as a combat aircraft

and withdrawn from service; production was canceled. It was a

hugely expensive mistake, and Messerschmitts reputation suffered

a crushing blow. He was shifted to production oversight responsi-

bilities, and design duties were largely removed from his purview.

After World War II, Willy Messerschmitt should have been a

beaten man. His fall from grace, from prosperity, from a position

of command and control was all but complete. His factories were

in ruins, and nobody seemed to care about his accomplishments.

He was briefy fown to London and interrogated after Germanys

surrender, then summarily shipped back to Germany for intern-

ment. While his counterparts Alexander Lippisch and Hans von

Ohain were swept up by Operation Paperclip and sent to the U.S.,

where they lived happily ever after, Messerschmitt ended up for-

gotten in a harsh, American-run camp called Heilbronn. He nearly

died of exposure and starvation during the winter of 1945-46. One

guard took it upon himself to shelter Messerschmitt inside a bar-

racks building, and perhaps because of what that soldier learned

from talking with him, the Americans fnally found out who they

had imprisoned.

Messerschmitt was moved to slightly more comfortable quarters,

but only to await the 1948 Nuremberg Trials. Meanwhile, a nephew

learned where he was being held and brought him a drafting table

and supplies. With them, Willy designed a watch that had only

three moving parts. He sold the drawings to a Swiss company for

5,000 Swiss francsenough that it became Messerschmitts post-

war start-up stake.

But frst, Willy was sentenced to two years in prison for know-

ingly using slave laborers, many of whom had come from Dachau,

near his Augsburg factory. Was Messerschmitt a Nazi? Yes. He

wore a swastika lapel pin constantly, and his party membership

number was 342354. Some say that he was not anti-Semitic, and

his membership was simply something he felt he needed to get the

government contracts that Erhard Milch had been blocking.

Upon his release, forbidden from laboring in the nonexistent

German aviation industry, Messerschmitt put his mind back to

work. First he designed a large wind turbine that, though never built,

had all the characteristics of todays renewable-energy machines:

variable-pitch blades to maintain a constant rpm, automatic over-

speed protection and aircraft-quality alloy construction. He also

missed the boat in 1953, when he began but never fnished work on

a hydraulic turbojet engine for forced-water marine propulsion.

Today such units propel jet boats and jet skis.

His frst productive project was prefab housing to renew Ger-

manys carpet-bombed residential areas. His units were built using

the simplifed alloy-frame construction techniques that Willy had

brian silcox, messerschmitt foundation/eads deutschland

Horst philipp pilots an Me-262A-1/c, outftted with General Electric cJ-610 engines, over ingolstadt, Germany, in september 2007.

designed into the 109 and other airplanes, and the individual units

were stackable and expandable in multistory complexes.

By 1951, Messerschmitt had reassembled some of his war-

time crew and rented factory quarters in Munich to build

home sewing machinesmuch needed in postwar Ger-

many. Production of these Messerschmitts continued until

1959, but quality control was poor, and they barely made a mark

on the market.

Messerschmitts best-known postwar product was his bubble

car, the KR 175 and 200canopied, tandem-seat three-wheelers

that looked like rolling fghter cockpits. Today they are prized

by enthusiasts, and one sold at this years Barrett-Jackson clas-

sic cars auction for $42,900.

Willy was always the frst to

point out, however, that the

KR was designed not by him

but by aeronautical engineer

Fritz Fend. What Willy brought

to the party was his talent at

ration alizing a fnal design for

the most effcient production,

just as he had with the Bf-109.

Neither the repentant Ger-

mans nor the Allies could forbid

Messerschmitt from working

in another countrys aviation

industry, so Willy approached both Spain and South Africa to see if

either fancied his designing and manufacturing airplanes for them.

South Africa passed, but Spain was a natural, since Germany had

always had friendly relations with dictator Francisco Francos gov-

ernment, beginning with the provision of aircraftincluding some

of the very frst Bf-109sfor Francos rebels during the Spanish

Civil War.

The Spanish company HASA (Hispano Aviacin S.A., which

became CASA and eventually was absorbed by Airbus Industrie)

was already license-manufacturing a version of the 109 with a

Rolls-Royce Merlin enginethe unfortunately bloodhound-nosed

HA-1112 Buchonand in 1951 it had called on Willy as a Buchon

adviser. In 1952 Messerschmitt put together a small team of German

engineers, including some who had worked for him during the war,

and he designed a trainer for the Spanish air force.

The HA-100 looked much like the T-28 Trojannot because

Willy had copied the North American design but because both

were built to the same criteria: an advanced, piston-engine, tricycle-

gear, tandem-cockpit military trainer. Both the original T-28A and

the HA-100 Triana, as it was called, used an 800-hp Wright R-1300

radial, and the Triana was slightly lighter and faster. The Spanish

were happy and wanted Willy to build 40 for them, but Spain

couldnt afford the Wright engines. The two prototypes were

scrapped, though their wings

were used in Messerschmitts

next project: the HA-200 Saeta

jet trainer, a few of which are

still being fown by American

and European enthusiasts look-

ing for a cheap way to get into

jet warbirding.

Always in search of effciency

and economy, Willy recycled as

much of the HA-100 design as

he could. But removing the big

radial from the nose and mount-

ing the two French Turbomeca

Marbor jets conventionallyin the wing roots or somewhere

behind the cockpitwould create a weight shift requiring a sub-

stantial redesign. So he stuck the small turbojets right where the

Wright had been, in the nose, just behind a catfsh-mouth air inlet.

When HASA tried to sell the HA-100 and -200 to other air forces,

its sales brochures emphasized Messerschmitts role, boasting that

he had been involved in every facet of the designsboth air-

craft have been personally designed and worked through by Willy

Messerschmitt down to the last detail. Egypt bought 10 HA-200s

and built another 90 under license.

28 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY MARCH 2014

Hispano Aviacin s.A.s Merlin-powered HA-1112 Buchon kept the Me-109 fying over spain into the 1950sand thereafter in movies.

the lightweight HA-300 might have out-gnatted Follands Gnat.

eads corporate heritage

richard paver

MARCH 2014 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY 29

It would be the last real Messerschmitt,

the fnal production airplane to fully

embody Willys emphasis on light weight,

modular construction, the combination of

several functions into single components

and attention to reducing assembly labor.

But Messerschmitt had one last jewel in

his vault: the HA-300, a sweptwing fghter

that at least on paper was as sleek and

potent-looking as anything from Dassault

or Lockheed in the early 1960s. Willys super-

jet was intended to use an afterburning

Bris tol (later Rolls-Royce) Olympus engine,

a version of which would power the Con-

corde. The British demanded that Spain

co-fund development of the reheat version,

which the Spanish couldnt afford any more

than they could afford elderly Wright radials.

Egypt, however, ended up owning the

HA-300 design when it bought the licens-

ing rights to the HA-200, and the Egyptians

were getting tired of Soviet demands as a

condition of supporting Egypts MiG feet.

They wanted their own jet, so they built

two HA-300 prototypes, one of which frst

few (with a non-afterburning Olympus)

in 1964. Messerschmitt enticed his friend

Ferdinand Brandner to come to Egypt, for

Brandner had helped develop the Junkers

Jumo 222 jet engine and, after being for-

cibly adopted by the Soviets, designed the

most powerful turboprop in the world

at the timethe 12,000-hp Kuznetsov

NK-12. Brandner was developing an

afterburning engine for Messerschmitts

HA-300 when the 1967 Six-Day Wara

disaster for the Egyptiansand renewed

Soviet ties scotched the project. Had they

not, Messerschmitt and Brandner might

well have created the lightest supersonic

fghter in the world.

Willy Messerschmitt died in September

1978 at the age of 80the only aircraft

designer ever to give his name to such a vast

and remarkable array of aircraft spanning

nearly half a century. J

For further reading, frequent contributor

Stephan Wilkinson recommends: Willy Mes-

serschmitt: Pioneer of Aviation De sign, by

Hans J. Ebert, Johann B. Kaiser and Klaus

Peters; Sharks of the Air: Willy Messer-

schmitt and How He Built the Worlds

First Operational Jet Fighter, by James Neal

Harvey; and Augsburg Eagle: The Story of

the Messerschmitt 109, by William Green.

Test pilots who few the Messer-

schmitt Me-210 in the late 1930s

reported serious design flaws.

Airplanes with checkered histories are

usually overlooked by model manu-

facturers, but in 1972 Revell issued a

1/72nd-scale Me-210A-1 that also fea-

tured parts for the improved Me-410.

And in 1998 Italeri released a new tooling

of the fghter, also in 1/72nd scale. Both

kits had short production lives, but a

determined modeler can still fnd Italeris

offering at swap meets or on the Internet.

I started construction on my Italeri

kit by painting the cockpit Schwarzgrau,

RLM-66, as indicated for day fghters in

the Offcial Monogram Painting Guide to

German Aircraft, 1935 to 1945. An expan-

sive greenhouse covers the pilots and

gunners positions. This is an area where

considerable time and effort will add

interest. The pilots area requires little

improvement, but the gunners compart-

ment needs scratch-built enhancements.

The A-1 version, which had a bomb

bay in the nose, was often used as a dive

bomber. I improved this area by box-

ing it in with plastic sheet. Next I assem-

bled two 1,100-pound bombs, sprayed

them dark green and set them aside.

Carefully cement the fuselage parts

together, to ensure the cockpit rests level.

I applied glue to the tabs on the horizon-

tal stabilizers, then left the assembly to

dry with blocks of balsa wood propping

them at 90 degrees to the vertical tail.

Its easy to overlook the two small tabs

of plastic that are glued into the cutouts

in the bottom of the main wing engine

nacelles. These rectangles of plastic serve

as a base that supports the main landing-

gear legs. With the main gear supports

solidly in place, glue the right and left

wing to the bottom section, and then

cement the completed wing assembly to

the fuselage.

Next ft the nosepiece into the front of

the fuselage. At this point it will become

evident whether or not the cockpit has

been cemented level into the fuselage.

You may need to correct the assembly by

trimming, sanding and flling.

While the fuselage is drying, assemble

the cowlings for the Daimler-Benz DB

601F engines. These cowls are handed

for the counter-rotating props, so use

care when gluing them to the wings.

Some flling and sanding will be needed

at the wing-to-fuselage joints and also the

attachments for the engine nacelles.

Check over your work, then fnish off the

basic construction with a spray of primer.

German aircraft camoufage colors

have long been controversial for model-

ers. Luftwaffe Fighter Aircraft in Profle, by

Claes Sundin and Christer Bergstrom,

indicates it was generally accepted from

1941 to 1944 that the undersides, vertical

stabilizer and a portion of the fuselage

sides of day fghters were painted RLM-76,

often called Lichtblau. The topside cam-

oufage on the wings, horizontal stabi-

lizers and top section of the fuselage

should be painted in a splinter pattern of

RLM-82, Dunkelgrn, and RLM-02, Grau.

The splinter pattern is accomplished by

frst painting the appropriate areas with

Grau, and then masking it off and spray-

ing with dark green, RLM-82. The mot-

tling on the fuselage and vertical tail is

achieved by spraying with RLM-75,

Grau violett, in irregular blotches. Note

that the camoufage pattern is illustrated

on the back of the kit box.

Mask and then paint the Me-210s

bomb bay RLM-02. When its dry, glue

the bombs into place. Once all the paint-

ing is complete, spray a coat of gloss over

the entire model, so theres a smooth

surface for the decal markings to adhere

to. Note that the kit offers markings for

two aircraft, one for Zerstrergeschwader 2

and anotherwhich I chosefrom ZG.8,

from Sicily in 1942.

Paint the landing-gear struts RLM-02

and the wheels tire black. Finally, mask

and paint the greenhouse, and then posi-

tion it in place using white glue.

Dick Smith

Build a Messerschmitt Me-210

dick smith