ROBOT PLANE: 1:72 SCALE PREDATOR FROM ITALERI

SMN featured the Italian Piaggio Ape earlier this week, and now it’s time for a robot, in the form of Italeri’s RQ-1B Predator. It’s a nice kit, with less than two dozen parts - just right for an evening’s work after the sun goes down. As a great fan of snap-tite kits for their speed of assembly, even I could happily squeeze some glue for this one.

In real life, Predators are flown by remote pilots, sitting in air-conditioned portacabins which may be thousands of miles away from enemy action. It must be a bit more relaxing than getting your pants shot off, that’s for sure. The tiny size of these drones makes them difficult to spot from the ground - a Predator orbiting a hot-spot from a few thousand feet up is effectively invisible.

Lebanese model fan Emad Tabsh has built an Italeri RQ-1B Predator, and his pictures are posted online here. A nice presentation, Emad. The YouTube vid gives a good live-action feel for the machine - the audio is spoken in Italian, so you may need a phrasebook, but if you have an Apple iPhone, there could be a translator app that’ll do the job.

The Italeri RQ-1B Predator is available from model stores and online suppliers, including Model Hobbies here.