By Bryce Nicely

Fiat G.55 Centauro

Kit No: SW72104

Scale: 1/72

Type: Injection Moulded Plastic

Manufacturer: Sword Hannants/UMM-USA

For those greybeards among us, the presence in the Airfix catalogues of old of their sole Italian World War II fighter, the Fiat G.50 Freccia, was both a source of fascination and frustration. Fascination because the G.50, with its hulking great cowling covering the radial engine, and an open cockpit, looked so different from the run of the mill British and German fighters. Frustrating because of its fiendish mottled camouflage scheme, which no amount of cutting down of brushes and stippling technique ever seemed to master. Worse, the relevant volume of the schoolboy modeller’s bible of the 1960s and early 1970s, William Green’s War Planes of the Second World War, revealed a host of fascinating Italian types that seemed to have been missed by Airfix and were beyond the ken of the little composite sports and model shops of the period, who never seemed to stock elusive FROGs, a company it was rumoured kitted both the Fiat CR42 and the Macchi C200.

But for the Italian enthusiast things long ago moved on, and the latest offering from the Czech company Sword provides us with Fiat’s successor to the indifferent G.50, the formidable G.55 Centauro. It was only built in small numbers, almost entirely for the post September 1943 Italian Social Republic’s Aeronautica Nazionale Repubblicana (ANR), along with some postwar exports. However with its refined fuselage and wing, a DB 605 A-1 engine giving the G.55 a maximum speed of 385mph at 23,000 feet, and heavy armament, it addressed and overcame the faults that had plagued earlier Italian fighters. All in all, a worthy addition to Sword’s catalogue.