Model-Aire International’s 1/72 Payen Pa. 22 Flechair

By Chris Bucholtz

History

France’s obsession with delta wings didn’t start with the Mirages of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1935, Nicolas Roland Payen formed SCEPA to examine this concept, along with some other radical ideas, in an effort to build a better air racer. For the 1939 Coupe Deutsch de la Muerthe race, Payen designed the Pa.22. Initially intended to be powered by a ramjet, the airplane had either tiny wings or a large delta-winged horizontal tail or delta wings and a large set of canards. The cockpit was set well back and was faired into the short tail. Despite this forward-looking planform, the plane had fixed, tail-dragging landing gear.

The 1939 Coupe Deutsch de la Muerthe was cancelled because of the outbreak of war. The Pa 22 was almost complete at this time, and the Germans captured the machine at the wind tunnel at Chalais-Meudon.

The unorthodox aircraft intrigued the Germans, who took the aircraft to Villacoublay and test flew it in 1942. It was scheduled for a full test-flight regimen at the German facility at Rechlin, but it was first modified at the Payen workshops with an extended tail fin and the wheel pants were removed from the gear struts. Unfortunately, while awaiting transport by rail to Germany, the plane was destroyed in an allied air raid. Payen went on to design and market several other delta-winged light aircraft after the war throughout the 1950s and 1960s and who continues to be actively involved in aircraft design to this very day.

The Kit (click on thumbnails for larger image)

This kit is the remedy for modelers who are starting to take short-run kits for granted. All the refinement of an MPM or a Classic Airframes kit is conspicuously absent, replaced by flash and roughly molded features. The kit’s instruction sheet explains why this is—the master was made 15 years ago and bounced from person to person until retrieved by Tom Young of Model-Aire International, who sent the parts off to Greg Meggs of High Planes. Greg made new wheels and a propeller and molded the kit in High Planes-style baby blue injection-molded plastic. Also included are a nice decal sheet (for those of us who don’t happen to have 1/72 Payen company logos clogging up the decal box) and metal parts for the tail wheel and main gear strut braces.

The kit is simple—20 parts, plus the white metal and a vacuformed canopy. Once the flash is cleaned up, the basic airframe looks fairly good (or at least as good as this airplane can look). The parts as provided allow you to build the Pa.22 before its vertical fin was modified. The cockpit has a floorboard, seat and a featureless control panel. There is some stringer and former detail on the fuselage walls, but some work will be required to make this cockpit presentable, especially with the clear, flawless canopy (molded by Falcon) providing a great view of the plane’s insides.

The wings all butt-join to the fuselage, which will make alignment tricky. A few hours with flexible files and sandpaper would be a wise investment; all the parts are lined with flash that must be removed if the model is to be assembled. Attention to the mating surfaces is especially important. The fuselage has a nose cap, on which the propeller rests; these parts need very careful attention to trim away the flash without wrecking their shapes.

The landing gear has flash-laden plastic struts, nicely molded wheels and metal braces. The tail wheel is entirely metal.

Construction is straightforward, which is a good thing, since the four-page instruction sheet has no instructions! There’s a very good history of this obscurity, and a comprehensive look at the plane’s colors and markings over its career. Six photocopied photos give you a very general idea of what the aircraft looked like; these are more tantalizing that informative, due to the poor quality of the copies.

The Pa.22 was originally painted in overall gloss medium blue; its German captors painted it first in dark green with light blue under surfaces, which were later painted yellow. The decals cover all these options, and are very well printed and provide six Payen logos in two sizes, The Flechair logo used on the German-schemed machines, and crosses, swastikas and codes for the German aircraft. Once you get past the build, it should be all downhill from there!

Conclusion

Despite the roughness of the basic parts, this is a very neat little kit. At three-and-a-half inches in length, it doesn’t take up a lot of space, but it will present a challenge to build. Goodness knows what the aircraft built today by our Luftwaffe ’46 model-building buddies would look like had the Pa.22 made it to Germany!

Our thanks to Model-Aire International for our review copy.