Pitching our Tents

We have two related Small Scale Scenery releases but at opposite ends of their respective size scale this week.

For the last couple of years we’ve been promising a customer at Colours that we’d make some WWI aircraft hangars, specifically these – Bessonneau tent hangars. We thank him for his patience, and expect him to purchase a minimum of ten sets tomorrow 😉 . Designed and built in Angers, France by Établissements Bessonneau, they were already fairly widespread before the Great War began. They were designed around a wooden frame with canvas sides and roof and could be assembled rapidly by a small team. The standard size was around 24m x 20m with an internal roof clearance of 4m, although they could easily be extended lengthways by adding extra bays.

They were used extensively by the French Aéronautique Militaire and also adopted by the British RFC and RNAS (and later the RAF). They continued to be used post-war, and in fact there are still some in existence including one in Alberta, Canada, although only the frame is original and the canvas has been replaced by more rigid materials.

We don’t make any WWI aircraft in this scale (or any scale, for that matter) so we’ve photographed them with a couple of our Imperial Skies British 2-seaters to give an idea of their size.

At the other end of the hangar scale is the enormous Type J and K aircraft sheds, built for the RAF in the 1930s. The main bay of these is around 120m x 60m, large enough for a football pitch (for any value of ‘football’). Either side are full-length annex buildings; in the Type Js these housed workshops and offices and had lots of access doors and windows, whereas the Type Ks were used more for aircraft storage so the annexes were mostly store rooms and had fewer external features (our model is a type J).

We’ve again posed it with a pair of Thornton 2-seaters so you can gauge the massive size of these edifices.

SSS-8233 – Bessonneau Hangars (pack of four) – £3.00
SSS-8234 – Type J/K Hangar – £9.00