Bravo52

It’s a small world...I can almost say the exact same thing! My father was a NASA engineer during the Apollo and Shuttle years. Saw many of the Apollo launches and a few of the Shuttle launches live growing up. Oh, I live in Albuquerque too...

All of my time was in military aircraft and was a Combat Flight Instructor in the schoolhouse. I can say that all of those principles apply to military flying as well. They may be applied differently, but the same none-the-less. Early in my career, we started incorporating more Crew Resource Management and increased Situation Awareness (we say "situational awareness" even though situational is not a word ) and it improved flying operations greatly. I could tell countless stories about how relying on automation became a problem when aircrew were task saturated. Much to my surprise, I will say I have to agree with Jennings in his original post, when things go bad, the first thing you have to do is "Fly the Jet." Aviate, Navigate, Communicate

There is a very nice presentation by an AA pilot called “Children of the magenta line” that speaks to automation in the cockpit. Ultimately, he concludes it has nothing (very little) to do with the hardware. It’s mostly about loss of situation awareness and the training to deal with it. It’s worth a read. I think it supports your position that there is no substitution for good piloting skills. The biggest of which is using your brain.

That's right Rick, we now know for certain the plane was orange and green.

Why did you waste money on that????.....errrrr....I mean the puzzle thingy..... ;)

Thanks for posting. I didn't realize it was that close to flying. It did seem like the right canopy was open for the flight (ref: 2:24 and 2:50 in video). Is there a mechanism that opens both at one time?

So you're saying the kit has fit issues... See where this goes? So if Tamiya is "above average" then does that make everything else just average or below average? I think it's semantics really. I have the ZM 229 kit and I think it's great. I'm glad its part of my collection. My problem is I'm just an average modeler so any kit that is better than an Airfix kit is lost on my skills. I look forward to seeing your Ki 45 when its done.

You’re close Darren. He’s an amazing modeler so I’m sure our definitions of “average” vary a bit.

A friend picked one up in Japan a couple of weeks ago and is already building. He said that the kit is packed with sprus and once he started building it that it needs a "ton of cleaning up." Lots of ejector pins in some really tough-to-get-to spots. On par with the 335 and 229, but an average kit. The best part is you can build any long nose variant from the box and it comes with all the parts in grey (duplicates of the clear).

These post are fun...I like to see the differing opinions on how and why the AF does things...

Not in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts...

It was fun to meet the group for sure. It was cool to put the faces with the names...err...online handles... CANicoll made me laugh when he explained the meaning! I always just said "can-e-coal"! Big shout out to BiggTim for the t-shirt effort. Lots of fun for sure and I got to meet a modeler/historian I've admired for a long time (David Weeks). I even got to meet Zactoman...even though he was just looking for Kenny... Unfortunately my two LSPs only came in 4th and 5th out of three...

Amazon requires it's sellers to deal with the taxes on their products. Amazon is just a pass through in some cases. I'm sure eBay would handle it the same. I work with a guy that does $4-5K a month through Amazon and he has to pay the taxes...not Amazon.

Just a marketing strategy really. It's a psychological effort to create a perceived "value" of the item. If you buy it at less than the MSRP, you feel like you got a "good" deal. Radu, as a manufacturer, from your perspective, if you set a MAP and a retailer goes below that, what is the "so what?"

“ I have enough Tamiya kits to build until I die anyway†is the best line of this thread! In reality this could have no impact on the retailer or customer. “See price in cart†or “Call for pricing†can likely negate any MAP issues (with a few exceptions). You have to consider that Tamiya can't dictate what retailer sells a product for, nor what they advertise it for; Tamiya can only dictate who they do business with. If a retailer won't agree to advertise at MAP, then Tamiya doesn't have to wholesale to them. Kinda simple really.