Revell’s Second Coming

By Karl Robinson

Kit No: 03937

Scale: 1/144

Type: Injection Moulded Plastic

Manufacturer: Revell GmbH www.revell.de/en

Several small aerials are moulded onto the starboard fuselage half but I chose to cut these off, storing safely for re-attachment later as they would hinder working to eliminate the central seam

Each of the cabin windows required varying amounts of excess flashing to be cleaned out, which is easily done by running a sharp blade around the inner edge. Although simple this is a time consuming process

Once the rudimentary cockpit and nose weight were installed, the inner surface of the fuselage was sprayed medium grey as this prevents a transparent look to the final model

Whilst the long haul commercial aviation market is dominated almost exclusively by the big boys of Boeing and Airbus Industries, the short to medium haul market has opened up quite a lot in the last decade or so allowing room for manufacturers such as the Brazilian Aerospace Conglomerate Embraer to get their feet under the table. Embraer’s E-Jet series of airframes have become more and more popular with the E170/E175 and E190/E195 models making their way into more and more fleets each year. These can now be commonly seen at many worldwide airports dotting between cities for many of the major airlines.

This is Revell’s second incarnation of the Embraer E-Jet series after last year’s release of the E195 in the colours of Lufthansa’s Italian feeder airline Air Dolomiti. The E190/E195 series feature greater than ninety five percent commonality in parts between the airframes, but the only aspect of concern for modelling is that the E195 is longer in fuselage length than the E190 by 2.43 metres. For those that want or need to know these things, the difference lies with eighty three centimetres chopped out forward of the front baggage door, and a further 160 centimetres removed between the rear of the wing fairing and the rear baggage door. With just a little jiggery pokery performed, well most probably dropping in an insert into the mould for the shorter fuselage, Revell have produced the E190 variant maximising the utility of the moulding for both airframes in the future. As the engines, wings and other external components are identical between these two models, this makes perfect sense.