COBI Yakovlev Yak-1b Set 5863

COBI's Yakovlev Yak-1b is built from 142 blocks, 18.5 cm long with a 22 cm wingspan, in the markings of the 1st Fighter Regiment "Warszawa". A printed brick reproduces the dedication painted on the original fuselage. No stickers.

A stage mentalist bought this aeroplane

The inscription on the side records who paid for it. Wolf Messing was a performer — a mentalist and telepathy act who filled theatres across the Soviet Union — and he bought a fighter with his own fee income and presented it to Polish pilots.

He was Polish and Jewish, born near Warsaw, and had escaped the ghetto to the Soviet Union in 1939. Buying an aircraft for the Polish squadron was a personal matter. He paid for a second one later in the war.

The practice itself was common: Soviet citizens, collective farms, factories and church congregations funded individual aircraft and tanks, and the donor's name was painted on the machine. What is unusual here is the donor.

The aircraft

The Yak-1b was the version with a cut-down rear fuselage and a bubble canopy, giving the pilot a view behind him that earlier Yaks did not have. Polish units flew them from 1943, and this was the best-known aircraft of the Polish forces in the East.

In the COBI range

Set 5862 is the Yak-3, the later development of this design.

Specifications

Pieces: 142 · No stickers
Model dimensions: 18.5 × 22 × 9.5 cm (7.3 × 8.6 × 3.7 in)