Hendon: For the serious aviation buff and/or Scale modeler, a visit to Hendon just outside London to see these rare machines is a pilgrimage well worth taking.

IT'S A TOSS-UP which is more packed with history: the displays in the Royal Air Force Museum at Hendon, or Hendon itself. Like so many places in England, the area is imbued with tales and legends of the early Celts and their Anglo-Saxon successors reaching back to what seems like the beginning of time. To a visitor from a relatively young country like the U.S.A., Hendon feels ancient indeed. One doesn't go back very far, of course, to trace the "beginning of time" for British aviation. In 1908 an American pilot named Samuel Cody made the first recognized flight on English soil, in a craft given the serviceable, if unglamorous, name of "British Army Aeroplane #1."

Beautiful and Ugly Airplanes

HERE WE GO again! Two more years have passed, and your proudly humble reporter has another batch of ugly and beautiful airplanes for your consideration. An eclectic assortment to be sure, they're at least as ugly or beautiful (one or the other, not both together) as those we've shown before. Some were suggested in your very well thought out letters; others are leftovers from prior deliberations; and still more came by way of lightning inspiration.

Bjorn Karlstrom

IF YOU'VE been a regular reader of American aviation magazines during the past three decades, the legend "Scale drawings by Bjorn Karlstrom" is a familiar one. From the hundreds of such publications in which Karlstrom's drawings have appeared over the last 35 years, the distinctive style of this Swedish artist is recognizable on sight. Yet who among us would know Bjorn Karlstrom if he walked through the door? Bill Winter, the venerable former editor of Model Aviation who was probably the first American editor to use Karlstrom's work back around 1950, has never set eyes on him or even spoken with him on the phone.

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