Eduard 1/48 Pfalz D.IIIa

by Bob Pearson

History

Pfalz Flugzeugwerke was started by the three Everbusch brothers to build aircraft under license for the Bavarian government. Prior to the start of WW1 they acquired the rights to various Morane-Saulnier and later Roland designs. With the knowledge gained building these designs they embarked on their own aircraft in late 1916.

While building Roland D.IIs under license, Pfalz was introduced to the construction of wooden fuselages that would be a feature of all their subsequent designs. The first of which was the robust Pfalz D.III, arguably the handsomest aircraft of WW1. Reaching the front in August 1917, the Pfalz D.III was fast, good in the dive, however it never found the favour that the better known Albatros D.V/Va did. One complaint pilots had with the Pfalz D.III was access to the machine guns which were buried under the forward decking. The D.IIIa rectified this by moving them to the 'usual' position on the decking in front of the pilot. The tailplane area was also increased. These changes were made into the producton run of D.IIIs starting with 4165/17, and by December there were 114 D.IIIas in service.

By April 1918 there were 433 D.IIIa versus just 13 D.IIIs at the front, however the day of the Pfalz was soon past and replacement by the newer generation Fokker D.VII, Pfalz D.XII and Roland D.VIs was at hand.

The Kit

This is the first of the new release kits that I have acquired and I was surprised to see there is no PE as in their earlier kits (of which I have a dozen). However I trust that their 'Profipack' version contains all the usual PE parts. Eduard have come a long way since their first kits which featured heavy moulding and required considerable cleanup prior to actual construction. Their newer kits have nice clean moulding and 'normal' size sprue attachments, so cleanup will be a breeze.

The fuselage is commendably thin on the engine opening, and has stringer detail moulded to the interior of the cockpit.

The engine is in two halves and will provide a good starting point to those desiring to detail it. Exhaust and the the manifold are separate pieces.

The Maxim 'Spandau' machine guns are nicely done, but many may wish to make use of the PE fretted barrels which are available from various companies of which Eduard is one.

Wings have nice thin trailing edges and a nice airfoil shape to them. The bottom wing is in the later style with rounded wing tips – most D.IIIas were so fitted.

Markings are for two well-known examples – the comet marked D.IIIa of Vzfw Max Holtzem of Jasta 16b, and the orange diamond marked D.IIIa 4203/18 of Ltn. von der Marwitz of Jasta 30. Holtzem's markings include the fuselage stripes and b/w comet, however it lacks the upperwing comet that research by Greg VanWyngarden and myself on the forthcoming Pfalz book by Flying Machines Press shows to be there. The boxtop incorrectly portrays it to have had wood coloured struts, although the kit instructions show it correctly as silbergrau. One final detail missing is that Holtzem had replaced the standard exhaust with six short pipes. This is easy to reproduce by replacing the kit exhaust with 1/4" sections of correctly shaped stock appropriately hollowed out.

Von der Marwitz's aircraft includes the new Eduard Express Mask system to provide accurate stencils to paint the tail in its orange diamond pattern. I have removed the un-needed portions from the sheet to show the pieces better.

To round out the decal sheet, Eduard have included the various stencils found on Pfalz aircraft, incuding the company logo.

Summary

The Eduard Pfalz D.IIIa is the kit for the newcomer to WW1 modelling . .. nothing more, nothing less. OOB it has interesting markings, and a little research (or a visit to my WWI aviation site) will show many others.

My thanks to Lubos Vinar of VAMP Mail Order for the review sample