Riding the Flames The dawn of the jet era…in 1910. The Coanda Jet in 1/72 By Gabriel Stern

Romanian Henry Coanda of later “Coanda effect” fame found himself taking off the ground –involuntarily, I am afraid- during a ground test of his revolutionary creation. Given his reduced talents to keep the aircraft aloft, the flight was very short and ended in disaster – although he escaped unscathed- but a careful observation of a strange phenomena –the flames exiting the combustion chamber adhering firmly along the sides of the fuselage- later became one of the most important contributions from Henri Coanda to physics, specifically to the dynamic of fluids.

The mysterious engine was in concept similar to the one utilized, decades later, in the Caproni-Campini CC-2, that is, a “mixed” engine, with an internal combustion unit driving the compressor stage of the jet.
His design, that incorporated a great deal of innovative features, went - for no reason, unaccounted to mainstream aviation history until recently.

The elegant and futuristic lines of his design were hard to resist, so out again with the glue, styrene, filler, sanding stick and the metal bits.
Available plans differ from each other and all of them differ from photos, so there you are –unless you are like me a shameless trafficker of dreams- submerged in the relentless fogs of scratch-building.

Hopefully the images will give an idea of the materials and techniques involved in this helter-skelterish attempt, but perhaps most important, will render a general sense of the gleaming beauty of the design. Seemingly flying away from a still of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” –by the way, a much later production- its proud pilot could well have been Little Nemo in Slumberland.

Some of us are interested in aviation history, some others in the constructional aspects of modeling, and some just love these planes for their diverse, rich, alternative, disconcerting but immensely attractive aesthetics.
So be it.