Not all that long ago you'd buy a kit like a plane or a car or a tank and you'd get at least one guy to go in it. Now a tank, you can have it with the hatches shut, but a plane? You can't have the seat empty, it just looks like a museum piece parked on a runway. It looks sad with the empty seat, the little man is a tiny bit of colour in his yellow life jacket and pink face sitting inside an otherwise dull cockpit interior.
The little man is a mere wisp of plastic, but for some reason manufacturers decided that he was not worth including any more. Suddenly it became the norm for all these kits to be released without pilots, not even offering the modeller a choice. If you don't want the pilot then give it away, but not including one in the fist place takes away any choice. So then you have to dig around in a bits box to hope you have some going spare. But here's the issue, you might only have a handful in the roughly correct uniform and size because oddly enough as someone who puts pilots in their aircraft you don't have a load going spare - you don't buy kits just to fish out the pilot and chuck the rest. But if you do throw a kit for some reason, the pilot is the first thing to save, because he might need to be called upon to fly again. It's ridiculous, you can't even buy a box of pilots for aircraft. You can get a load of ground crew and the odd pilot, but who wants to buy whole boxes of ground crew just to get a couple of men, you want a whole box of pilots all sitting down in a variety of uniforms.
If I were reviewing aircraft kits for a magazine I would say "no pilot" under the criticisms every single time, because it's something they should be called on. Almost all kits now with pilots are old kits being reissued, not new toolings. Perhaps it's some sort of snobbery against having a little man in the craft because it makes it look like a toy. Well it's a bloody model aircraft, anyone building one is just a big kid and anyone who claims they don't wave their newly completed kit around a bit in the air making engine and machine gun noises is either a liar or a dullard.
It's just as bad with car kits. All the older Formula 1 models from Tamiya came with an optional driver with full decals for the helmet. But suddenly they decided it was too much effort or they wanted to seem grown up. So out went the man and up went the prices and having a car without a driver is a much more glaring void in the model than a plane with no man. The man in the car brings it to life. A F1 car without a driver has no soul, you only see them when they are on jacks in the garage. I build all my F1 cars with men and put them on a piece of tarmac as through they are mid race.
So jolly good, all the other cars from the 70s and 80s have little men, none of the modern cars have them. Isn't that a backward step? 1/20th drivers are not as easy to find as pilots for an aircraft, you could almost buy another car for the cost of some of the metal/resin ones done by small manufacturers. Admittedly Tamiya released their rally drivers separately but you still need to do some work to convert the helmets and because you have no decals you have to hand paint them. So that's why we bought a heap when they were available. But there again, the majority of their touring cars and rally cars are released without any men and rally cars require two figures. Fortunately as F1 cars only have one man the packets of figures we do have will go some distance.
The lastest F1 car release from Tamyia is the 2009 Ferrari F60 which depending on where you can find it being retailed costs anywhere up to an eye-watering £50. That's absolute insanity for a 1/20th plastic car kit even if it does have some fancy photo-etch. So they can put some photo-etch in but they can't put a man in. Considering the price of plastic kits today that is a disgrace.
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