Prologue

I've always thought of myself as a scale modeller. The first plane I built (with my Dad's help) was the Airfix Piper Cherokee Arrow II when I was about 6 years old, and my first solo project was later the same year, the Airfix Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet. I used a whole tube of glue! Over the ensuing years, I built hundreds of kits – almost all of them planes, and almost all in 1/72. Being the nerd that I am, I didn't even take the traditional hiatus from the hobby that most modellers seem to take in their teenage years. My modelling holiday came as an adult – a result of inner-city apartment living not lending itself to expansive, messy, and smelly hobbies. So modelling was put on hold, and nearly five years passed. Far from having forgotten about the hobby, five years of drooling over other peoples' projects on Modelingmadness, Starship Modeler, Hyperscale, Internet Modeler, and the public library's stock of FSMs made me hungrier than ever.

Now that I have my own patch of dirt, the limitation is no longer space but time, since I own a small business as well. But one day, as I visited one of my business suppliers, I had a spare ten minutes and decided to drop into a hobby shop nearby. I had recently read with much sadness of Airfix's business troubles, and found myself drawn nostalgically to that company's range on the shelves. Over the years, I had built an example of virtually all the 1/72 Airfix kits they had in stock, and I thought to myself that maybe I should just buy one as a fast, easy project to get started back into the hobby. But then indecision struck – which one? I knew that I didn't want to buy a kit of a favourite aircraft that would have me agonising over accuracy issues, but if it wasn't going to be a plane I particularly cared about, how would I ever choose? Well, before I knew it, I was thinking that at only roughly $10 each, why not buy a few… Themed collections have always been an important part of the hobby to me, one of the reasons I've stuck so religiously to the One True Scale. And as I looked at the range of Airfix kits, the germs of an idea started to form. I realised that the kits that were attracting me were World War II fighters. My ten minutes were up and I needed to get back on the road. Although I didn't buy anything that day, I knew what I wanted to build.

As I drove home that night, I mulled over the three kits I had almost bought: Spitfire, Bf 109, Mustang (probably the three most kitted and most modelled aircraft in history!) Hmmm – what would go well with those? Well, obviously, you'd put them together with other contemporary fighters. I'd have to find a Zero and a Soviet fighter of some type, and maybe an Italian and French one too... But wait – it's not really a good match-up, is it? The Mustang was a significantly more advanced aircraft than the Spitfire and Bf 109, both products of the mid-1930s. They'd have to be a late-model, Griffon-powered Spitfire and a late Bf 109, or perhaps better still, a Hawker Tempest and a Fw 190. And what would be a better US stablemate for the Spitfire and Me 109? Probably a P-40. So the scope of the idea started to grow wider, across nations, and deeper, through time.

When I got home, I opened up a fresh spreadsheet and started to brainstorm ideas. Down each row, I entered a decade, and across the columns, I entered nations. I tried to fill each cell with each nation's "best" fighter for the decade, for the moment ignoring the problematic nature of the word "best". My first draft (completely off the top of my head) went something like this:

	US	UK	Germany	Italy	France	Japan	Russia
1910s		Camel	Fokker D.VII		SPAD XIII
1920s	Peashooter	Gladiator
1930s	P-40	Spitfire	Bf 109	Fiat CR.42		A5M "Claude"	I-16
1940s	Mustang	Tempest	FW 190	Fiat G.50	D.520	Zero	Yak-9? La-5?
1950s	Sabre	Hunter			Ouragan		MiG-15
1960s	Starfighter	Lightning		Fiat G.91	Mirage III		MiG-21
1970s	Eagle	Harrier			Mirage F.1	F-1	MiG-25
1980s		Tornado			Mirage 2000		Su-27
1990s
2000s	Raptor	Eurofighter			Rafale	F-2	MiG 1.44

I knew I'd have to check some of my facts, but some other issues became clear straight away.

1. Who's missing?

As soon as I filled out the 2000s row, the absence of the Saab Gripen became obvious, and I realised that Sweden should be added to the list of nations. But this set me wondering – which other nations had a history of producing their own fighter aircraft? Further research would reveal another ten or so (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Argentina, Australia, Latvia, Israel, China, India, Taiwan), none of which could have contributed to more than one or two of the decades. I decided to exclude these and focus on the major players; those which would have at least five aircraft in the collection.

2. "Best" or "Most representative"?

The question of "best" was always going to be arbitrary, but "Germany – 1910s" threw it into sharp relief very early in the process. If there's a symbol of World War I German aviation (maybe World War I aviation in general), it's the Fokker Triplane, so should this take the place of a more capable aircraft? I also wondered this about the Sopwith Camel and the SE5a and, later, the Corsair and the Hellcat.

3. What's a fighter?

The focus here has been on interceptors and air superiority aircraft – those designed to go mano a mano with other aircraft. Yet fighter planes have always served other roles as well, and for many the air defence role has been secondary to, say, tactical strike. So should the G.91 and the Harrier be included? What about Germany and Italy's Tornado variants? In the end, all these examples were included in the absence of a "purer" fighter for those nations in those decades.

4. What about the navies?

As I thought about US fighters, I struggled to decide whether to choose an Army/Air Force fighter or a Navy fighter for each decade: Mustang or Corsair? Eagle or Tomcat? I soon decided that with excellent land- and ship-based fighters in each of the decades, the US should be represented by one of each. Again, further research suggested that this would be a sensible approach for Japan for the first half of the century as well. But what about Britain? While the US and Japan in almost all cases had naval fighters developed and purchased entirely independently of their land-based counterparts, British naval fighters were almost all direct derivatives (Sopwith Camel 2F1, Sea Gladiator, Seafire, Sea Fury, Sea Harrier – even the Seahawk was a distant relative of the Hunter). I didn't think that including these would add much to the collection. At the same time, keeping the British services combined allowed me to use the Sea Harrier as the fighter for the 1970s, which is more correct than calling an RAF Harrier a "fighter".

5. The problem of the 30s, 40s, and 50s

The idea for this collection came originally from fighters of these decades, yet with the whole evolution of the fighter aircraft through the 20th century laid out in front of me, I felt dissatisfied with the 40s – sure, here was the very pinnacle of piston-engined fighter development, but what about the Me 262, the Meteor, and the Shooting Star? As I worked on checking my dates and refining the plan, similar problems showed up in the 30s and the 50s. For the 1930s, it seemed like I could include the zenith of biplane development, or the first generation of monoplanes. For the 1950s, the "iconic" fighters of the decade, the F-86, MiG-15, and their counterparts were obsolete by the end of the decade, surpassed by supersonic fighters. It's amazing just how fast aircraft technology progressed in those three decades – a completely new generation of fighters every five years or so. I decided that my collection should reflect this, and so arbitrarily added three decades to the 20th Century! The rapid developments of the 30s, 40s, and 50s really surprised me, particularly perhaps the overlap between the biplane and monoplane eras – the Gladiator and the Spitfire were almost contemporaries!

6. The problem of the current generation

With the end of the Cold War, the number of new fighter designs has greatly diminished in the last few decades. For the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, most of the nations on the list had only a single significant new fighter enter service, and for the UK/Germany/Italy's Tornado, the German and Italian versions were more attack aircraft anyway. I was happy to condense these decades together and lose the Tornado, and, less happily, France's Mirage 2000. This way, each row has at least five aircraft as well.

The final list:

	US Army/AF	USN	UK	Germany	Italy	France	Japan Army	Japan Navy	Russia/USSR	Sweden
1910-1919			Camel	Fokker D.VII	Ansaldo Ballila	SPAD XIII			Sikorsky XVI
1920-1929	P-1 Hawk	F6C Hawk	Bulldog		Fiat CR.20	NiD 622		1MF	Polikarpov I-3
1930-1934	Peashooter	F3F	Fury	Arado Ar 65	Fiat CR.32	MS.225	Type 91	A2N	Polikarpov I-15
1935-1939	P-36	F2A	Spitfire	Bf 109	Fiat G.50	MS.405	Type 10	A5M	Polikarpov I-16	Jaktfalk
1940-1944	Mustang	Corsair	Tempest	FW 190	Macchi MC.205	D.520	Ki-43	A6M Zero	Yak-9	FFVS J-22
1945-1949	Shooting Star	Banshee	Meteor	Me 262			Ki-84	N1K	Yak-15	Saab J-21
1950-1954	Sabre	Panther	Hunter			Ouragan			MiG-15	Tunnan
1955-1959	Super Sabre	Crusader	Lightning		Aeritalia G.91	Super Mystere			MiG-19	Lansen
1960-1969	Phantom	Phantom				Mirage III			MiG-21	Draken
1970-1979	Eagle	Tomcat	Sea Harrier			Mirage F.1	F-1		MiG-25	Viggen
1980-2009	Raptor	Super Hornet	Eurofighter			Rafale	F-2		Su-27	Gripen

From the outset, the idea was to provide a project to get back into modelling and I will be trying to complete one kit per week! Therefore, the kits selected should be cheap and readily available and no aftermarket to be used (except possibly decals if nothing provided by the kit or found in the spares box is suitable). I'm also conscious that for some of the more obscure aircraft, there may not be a top-notch kit available, so to my mind there doesn't seem to be much point ensuring an expensive, high-quality kit for only half the aircraft in the collection. So the kit used will be whatever's closest to hand and cheapest!

With the same expediency in mind, even though I prefer enamel paints, I thought that the quick clean-up offered by acrylics would make them more suitable, allowing me to make little inroads on painting by grabbing little bits and pieces of time when I can. For a long time, I also considered brush painting, but decided that I couldn't go back to that again.

Finally, I decided that I should follow a strict build order for the collection, rather than just pick out the kits I found fun or easy and then be stuck with a long hard slog at the end. So I've decided to move ahead decade by decade, starting with the 1910s. As I write, I've been able to track down kits for the Sopwith Camel and SPAD XIII (both by Academy), and can mail-order others soon enough. So off we go!

Update

After I compiled the original list, I realised that there were far too many interesting and world-class fighters missing from it. These machines were the products of countries that did not maintain an aircraft manufacturing industry throughout the twentieth century. To accommodate these, I added an extra "nation" to each time period, to feature a fighter that could stand alongside those of the major aircraft-building nations:

1910-1919	Phönix D.II (Austria-Hungary)
1920-1929	Avia BH-21 (Czechoslovakia)
1930-1934	PZL P.11 (Poland)
1935-1939	Fokker D.XXI (Netherlands)
1940-1944	IAR-80 (Romania)
1945-1949	Ikarus S-49 (Yugoslavia)
1950-1954	Avro Canada CF-100 (Canada)
1955-1959
1960-1969	HAL HF-24 Marut (India)
1970-1979	IAI Kfir (Israel)
1980-2009	Chengdu J-10 (China)