I believe that my passion for aviation and to be more precise military aviation started quite early while I was a teenager. I have a few, though very clear memories of me and my father sticking together plastic models of planes. But that was really only that much at that time - just stick all the parts together and apply decals and model was finished. Another one is of me standing in the only scale modeling shop in the city, looking at the shelves full of all this bigger scale models wanting to grab any one of them... of course each and every one much to expensive to buy...
Then, a few years later when I was in high school I started my adventure with paper model kits. Together with my friend we spent countless afternoons and weekends sticking together models of aircrafts and ships - that was a lot of fun. For sure I learned then that patience and lack of rush is the key! Aside of paper modeling I got interested in PC simulators starting with TFX, then EF2000 and of course Falcon 4.0.
Moving forward a memory lane, over a decade later I had a 2 years time period of playing DCS World simulation - what an amazing experience that was! DCS World in my opinion is the most authentic and realistic simulation of military aircrafts, especially when you manage to become a member of the 476th vFG - the best virtual fighter group there is. Amount of acquired knowledge is astonishing, learning of realistic procedures, tactics and techniques and using it together with these guys in the online events is beyond amazing! The downside of all this was that it was taking all of my time, and it was still not enough... In the end I decided that I want to have a life and resigned. On the left you can see how my gear used to look like.
Last part of the journey started in August 2018. At that time I decided to get back to paper modeling, but as it turned out I did not have so much fun as I had had years ago. What worse, I was getting frustrated that it did not go as it supposed to... After a few months of trying to get back on track my girlfriend asked me "Why don't you try plastic models?" At first I replied "meh, it is too easy, you just have parts which you stick together and that's it...", though a couple of days later I decided to watch a couple of videos on YouTube to see what scale modeling is all about these days. I very quickly realised how deeply wrong I had been... 30 minutes or so was enough for me to understand that going through all the stages of putting together plastic model kit must be a lot of fun and that this is something that I will like for sure! I was not wrong, not wrong at all! After year and a half scale modeling become my sole passion and my "gear" today looks a bit different, but more on that in the next post.
