It’s the 29th of December 1944, and RCAF Squadron 411 is in a battle with a group of Luftwaffe fighters over Osnabrück in western Germany.
At the controls of his Supermarine Spitfire IXe, Fight Lieutenant Dick Audet has an FW190 in his sights. The Spitfire’s guns tear into the enemy aircraft, until – after a moment – it rolls over and plunges downwards to destruction.
Audet watches for a few seconds, before snapping back to the fight raging around him, and turns his sights to the next German fighter. Over the next five to seven minutes Audet destroys a further four enemy aircraft, astonishingly becoming both an ‘Ace-in-a-Day’ and the only Spitfire pilot to achieve Ace status in a single sortie.
Audet would go on to fly over fifty sorties, claiming eleven enemy kills, before he too was killed in action, brought down in March of 1945 by the anti-aircraft defences of the German train he was strafing.
This spectacular homage to Fight Lieutenant Dick Audet was discovered by one of our Elves on Flickr, and comes from crash_cramer, who has recreated Audet’s glorious Supermarine Spitfire IXe in massive 1:9 scale.
Measuring over a metre long and with a 120cm wingspan, this incredible brick-built replica doesn’t look like LEGO at all, such is its phenomenal realism. Admittedly, that might be because a few components are not in fact LEGO, with the propellor spinner, exhausts, wheel caps, guns, aerial, and outer-wing leading edges meticulously 3D-printed, whilst the cockpit canopy is vacuum-formed.
A green vinyl wrap recreates the Spitfire’s camouflage, with superb decals replicating the roundels and squadron markings of Audet’s fighter.
The result is very probably the most accurate aircraft that this site has ever featured, and you can find all of the stunning imagery, plus read more about the build and the amazing story of Fight Lieutenant Dick Audet, at crash_cramer’s photostream. Join us there via the link in the text above.
Too much non-LEGO.
Where to draw the line? I don’t know. But I think this is on the far side: this is a model/sculpture that happens to use a LEGO skeleton.
Hello dsr
Thanks for your message. We do rule out content for being not LEGOy enough, and it’s good to know what our readers think on this subject when we do make a publication call.
Kind regards
TLCB Team
As the builder of this creation I will give you my view. There are 25 non lego parts in this model (12 of those being exhasuts) out of a total of around 6000 Lego pieces. It took the best part of 2 years to design and build of overwelmingly Lego. Everyone can have their opinions if they like custom parts being used, but to call it a Lego skeleton is a bit far fetched…Thank you TLCB for the blog!