Nice artwork Roobs 🙂

The La-11 is owned and stored by TFC – I am not aware of any restoration work having been undertaken on it to date. One thing is for certain – it will be stunning when they get round to it, if the performance of the La-9 is anything to go by anway.

Peter – a useful list but a bit out of date now – the Military Aviation Museum example has been flying since last year – the Jacquard machine has changed owners and is under re-build in Germany – the Blair D-9 has also changed owners to MAM.

This is an interesting thread…. I have no personal experience of this aircraft myself but I have done the specialist painting on a repro FW-190 recently so I can understand the issues to some extent. I think its hard to reach a conclusion from the posted pics without knowing the aircraft at first hand (and only Bruce and a Boghopper’s ‘guest’ here can boast that). I admit I did give some thought as to how I would have tried to do it given the opportunity and concluded the paint shop had quite a task on their hands. From the photo captions it seems that they applied the factory scheme and then overpainted the ‘local’ forest colours, as would have been done orignally. That certainly seems like the correct way to go – although I had imagined the locally applied paint would have been ‘rough’ and ‘improvised’ considering the conditions under which it would have been applied and that would need to be carried through in to this modern re-paint. Perhaps applying the local paint in a way to allow the factory colours to still be visible. Of course there can be a temptation to try to reproduce a ‘weathered’ appearance – but then you are going down the movie paint route and its not something that is generally done these days outside of the film world. Of course, as Bruce pointed out, getting some flying done and some exhaust grime on her will improve things – I discovered this with The Fighter Factory ‘White 11’ we did last year – looked much better once it was dirty! The attached photo is a recent one taken in the hangar and shows her after a good few hours or flying and only light cleaning – the whole effect is much ‘mellower’ so the FHC machine will get similar treatment so long as they dont go mad with the cleaning fluid!

So I think I would like to see some more pictures with a few hours of flying under her belt – until then….

Regardless of the relative merits of the paint scheme its still a magnificent achievement by everyone connected with the project!

The inspection was made on behalf of a potential purchaser (he did not buy the aircraft in question -but it was eventually purchased by another party).

cynic!

😀

A couple taken by me – Goxhill 2002.