If you want to draw modern parallels with the past then I would have to think that the closest modern aircraft to the Junkers Cl.I in my humble opinion would be the A-10 or the Russian SU-25. 

The Junkers Cl.I was a huge leap forward.  It was all metal so it could be mistreated to an extent that you just couldn’t do to a standard World War One aircraft. In fact after WWI the Allies and other countries found some of these all-metal aircraft that had been abandoned and left out in the freezing snow, ice and rain of a harsh northern European winter for months.  They found that aside from wheels and propellers they were totally flyable. 

The first Cl.I prototype flew late in 1917.  The Inspektion der Fliegertruppen (Idflieg) was impressed with the type and wanted to order it but was not impressed with Junkers’s production capacity.  Idflieg didn’t want the Cl.I to take away from the production of the Junkers J.I.  So for a while the Linke-Hoffmann Werke in Breslau who prior to WW.I was known for building locomotives and rolling stock was looked at to produce the Cl.I under license.  In the end Hugo Junkers with the help of Anthony Fokker started to produce the Cl.I in 1918. Accounts from test pilots state that it was quite fast and highly maneuverable.  It was expected to make quite an impression on Allied troops once it had entered frontline use.  By the time of the Armistice only eight Cl.Is were delivered and none are known to have seen combat.  By then it had become quite liked and was considered to be the successor to the Halberstadt Cl.IV that equipped most of the Schlachtstaffeln at the time.

After the war the type remained in German service along with examples in Russia and Latvia.

The Cl.I did eventually see combat in 1919 during the Baltic war with the Kampfgeschwader Sachsenberg.   It gave aerial support to the Freikorps who were fighting Russian Communist forces on the Baltic borders of Germany, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. The Cl.Is helped to establish air superiority and mainly flew ground support missions for the Freikorps forces.

Pegasus has been around for a while, over 20 years.  This kit is now out of production and somewhat hard to find.  But as far as I am concerned it is one of their better kits.  (Editor's note: The Pegasus of the past is gone. The company was sold to the folks who do Freightdog Models a year or two back. As of this writing, I have not heard of them reissuing any older Pegasus molds, but it is a possibility that they will do them in resin.)

In the box you will find light colored injection molded parts, strut and rod stock. Decals are for one aircraft.  The plastic is the standard Pegasus format, gray with a some flash. All in all really not bad, they just need to be cleaned up.  The corrugation, panel lines and details are nicely reproduced with either raised or engraved lines where appropriate. The cockpit is a little light on detail as is common with this company.  The good thing is that in 1/72 scale a lot of detail here is hard to see.  But, if you want to you can just go to town and add scratched detail to your heart’s content.

The metal parts are usually well done.  This is common with British made limited run kits.  Like with the other parts you will need to clean them up but as a rule of thumb they don’t need as much clean up

The box states that the kit is for experienced modeler, that is because you'll have to do some fabrication. This kit lets you bypass the wing strut manufacturing.  I still recommend a good reference when building Pegasus and Blue Max Kits.  If you keep mistakes to a minimum you should have more then enough material.

The instructions are more or less adequate, in other words basic.  On one side you have an exploded drawing of the kit and on the other side you get construction notes. Also included are little templates to assist you in any fabricating and on the back of the box you will find nice three view drawings. I find that if you have these enlarged to scale you can build the model on them. This allows you to make sure that all the parts are lined and squared up.