As a kid, I was into plastic kits of all sorts, and comic books.  A big favorite was Star-Spangled War where soldiers in the Pacific in subs and planes and tanks found themselves shooting it out with giant vicious dinosaurs.  But then I grew up.  Still, I sometimes got this urge to do something with my hands, and started doing models again.  The wood and tissue kind.  Time to be a kid again. 

But there's a darker side here.  The world is flat.  By that, I mean that we can travel across the world by internet in seconds.  The global village is no longer a fetish of babblers.  But the world is also very shallow.  We are cut off from history.  Do most high school students even know who the major players were in WWI?  For that matter, do their teachers?  Cut off from history, we are vulnerable to manipulation, 1984 is long upon us, the lies in today's newspapers immediately supersede the lies in yesterday's newspapers.  We lack the anchors that both restrained us and at the same time stabilized our collective moral compass.

The Great War (as it was called before they started numbering them) was a disaster for humanity.  The representatives of the working class of England, France, Germany and Russia all swore they would never vote for war.  Worker must not kill worker.  But when the shooting broke out in 1914, they all voted to support their respective national imperial ambitions,

and it ended with 21 million killed for the War to End All Wars.  And the next one took over 60 million.

At least part of the fascination with the air war in WWI was that it brought glory and glamour to the killing business.  It was good PR.  It also brought honor, courage and innovation.  That was real.  It was in fact an amazing human endeavor.  That's part of my fascination, and another part is my love of the craft, but I must admit that part of my fascination has that darker side, the fascination one has with a deadly reptile, the beauty of the killing machine.  But the killing business of the Great War is long forgotten amidst the horrors of today.  Today, my hope is that my planes provide a connection to that forgotten past, in the hope that it will do, well, something ...

... and part of it is still the joy of the little kid I still am.