Dekno 1/48 Spartan 7W Racer
| KIT #: | GA 480103 |
| PRICE: | $62.00 |
| DECALS: | one option |
| REVIEWER: | John Summerford |
| NOTES: | 3D Printed kit |
| HISTORY |
Courtesy Mid America Flight Museum
The Spartan 7W Executive model is an all-metal construction with retractable landing gear and fabric covered control surfaces designed and built in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Spartans were built for comfort and performance for both personal and executive businessman. A total of 36 were built between the years of 1936 to 1940 designed by Spartan Aircraft Company and first flight accomplished on March 8, 1936. A couple variants were built for military applications with guns and bomb racks, but was a short-lived program that never gained interest. A total of 16 7W’s were drafted into service and designated as UC-71’s and were used for executive transport for military staff. After 33 years of Spartan Aircraft Company manufacturing aircraft, they sold to Spartan School of Aeronautics, now known as Spartan College of Aeronautics and Technology.
Arlene Davis
Excerpted from Wikipedia.
Alma Arlene Davis became interested in flying when her husband bought a plane and she earned her pilot's license in 1931. She later became the first private pilot to receive an instrument rating and the first woman to earn her 4M qualification for piloting multiengine planes. By 1940, she held "more different and difficult kinds of ratings than...99 out of 100...commercial pilots".
She soon began participating in air races, winning the first race she participated in (Dayton, Illinois, 1934) as well as the 1936 Miami-Havana International Air Race. In 1938, she was the only woman to take part in the New York–Miami McFadden Race, and in 1939 she finished fifth in the Los Angeles–New York Bendix Race. (The winner, Frank Fuller, flew a P&W Twin Wasp powered Seversky versus Davis’ Wasp Junior powered Spartan.) She finished fourth in the 1946 Halle Trophy Race.
During World War II, she taught instrument flying to Army and Navy aviators at Baldwin-Wallace College. She also served as President Eisenhower's aviation chair for Ohio and was chair of the Office of Civil Defense's Operation Skywatch in the region encompassing Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky.
In 1959, she flew 20,000 miles across the North and South Atlantic oceans in her twin-engine Beech Travel Air, with Clay Donges as her navigator. The trip took 13 days and was the first time that a private plane had flown the North and South Atlantic in a single trip.
Flying and Popular Aviation magazine named her America's outstanding woman pilot of "big ships" in 1940. She was the first woman to receive the Veteran's Pilot Award, and the first woman to be honored with the Elder Statesman of Aviation Award.
Davis died of cancer in 1964.
| THE KIT |
Dekno has started to produce 48th scale kits by using the 3-D printing process. This kit is one of three variants of the Spartan Executive. (The other kits are of a shiny natural metal with red trim plus a petite Texaco logo on the fuselage and a military olive green over gray UC-71)
A sturdy
cardboard 7 ½ inch by 4 ½ inch box holds the kit. The label on the lid has a
typo, which yours truly commits frequently, omits the “o” in “Trophy” (I’d
like to buy a vowel Pat….)