Airfix: a lifelong passion for men of a certain age
Created | Updated Jan 30, 2017
This Guide submission consists of semi-useless trivia that would be of sentimental interest only to men of a certain age....
Airfix used to have the reputation of being THE big name in plastic kit modelling. Over a 40-year trading lifespan their products worked themselves into the hearts and fond memories of successive generations of boys, some of whom grew up but could not grow out of plastic kit modelling!
So where did Airfix begin? The company started life as a military contractor, providing pressed and moulded plastic items to the British forces in WW2. Its product range might have included combs, buckles, hairbrush handles, et c, all those little bits of miscellanea that armies need lots and lots of.
Faced with a crisis in August 1945, when the military market abruptly contracted somewhat, Airfix diversified into childrens' toys and related items. (Early toys from the late forties now change hands for thousands).
Its first plastic construction kits appeared in the early 1950's, and were almost entirely model railway accessories: buildings, functioning rolling stock, non-functioning locomotive kits, et c.
Over the 25-30 years before the company went bust in 1979, the range expanded to be the single biggest range of plastic construction kits available anywhere in the world.
This had its downside: tooling up to release a model kit is not cheap, and once the tools and moulds are devised, they must be in use for a long time to recoup the investment and return a profit. Any errors that persist to the production stage cannot easily be rectified, and the temptation is always going to be there to squeeze one more production run out of a set of master moulds which are really past it and beyond further use.
The quality of Airfix kits also varied wildly. Factors such as the skill of the craftsman turning out the master parts, the age of the mould, the quality of the research, all contributed to the overall success of the finished kit.
It is still the case that on the oldest Airfix kits, you may still see an impression (meant to be hidden inside or underneath the finished model) that tells you something like "AIRFIX MODELS. © 1958" - ie, the year of first release of that model.
To pick one of the oldest Airfix models still available today: the StüG III German assault gun1 has the legend “AIRFIX MODELS. © 1960” imprinted on its hull baseplate. This is a pointer to why Airfix declined and fell as market leaders: the Airfix kit of this tank is forty-five years old, and has never been updated or brought into line with modern expectations as to what makes a good model. In those 45 years, at least four other manufacturers have released models of this vehicle, all of which, without exception, are better, cleaner, crisper and which incorporate more detail. The most recent StüG III kit on the market is from Revell Models (Germany), who released theirs in 2003. Putting the two completed models side-by-side is not kind.
Airfix undoubtedly suffered from being the first into the market, so that its moulds and tools, expensive investments to set up and replace, were first to become obsolete.
By the time the company crashed in 1979, it was clear that the original owners (who were passionate modellers as well as businessmen) had accepted this was a problem and that they were investing in retooling their older models.
In the middle to late 1970's, their earliest military figure sets – British, German and American infantry of WW2 – were all progressively replaced by state-of-the-art military figures, which at the time were easily the world’s best in 1:762, and which can still hold their own today. The original 1950's-designed WW2 figure sets are hopelessly crude and fuzzy, even though a generation of wargamers cut their teeth on these.3 Interestingly, at this time Airfix also filled in a gap by adding the sixth major player in WW2: for the very first time there were WW2 Italian Infantry4, hitherto overlooked, despite Italy being one of the principal combatants5.
We can only speculate on what might have been had the company not gone bankrupt….its post-1979 owners – businessmen but not modellers? - have ignored the need for retooling, hence some of the “things” still sold today under the Airfix brand name. It is certainly the case that the Japanese and Russian WW2 infantry are still what they were in the early 1960’s, as the redesign process sadly never got this far. At least these are the best of the 1950’s original figures and even then were superior quality to the rest: but in 2005, somewhat elderly and in need of retirement.
Also, Airfix have released models which the trade press has critically panned. Not even the (in-house)Airfix Magazine had a kind word to say for the Airfix Crusader Tank, which was grotesquely out of scale owing to accumulated production errors. Most of the serious modelling press fell on this kit with words of scorn and derision for its multiple faults. For the uninitiated, the Crusader was designed as an ultra-fast tank to take advantage of the wide open spaces of North Africa. Compared to the pedestrian 20mph of the German Panzer Mark 4, the Crusader was designed to crack along at 45-50mph on the flat. It should therefore have a long, lean, almost streamlined look, as if MG or Maserati had taken an interest in the design. The Airfix kit makes it look more like a Morris Minor or a Vauxhall: shorter, taller and fatter than the designers intended. Despite universally poor review, however, the flaws with this kit have never been corrected, nor has it been withdrawn from sale as sub-standard. (which it undoubtedly is).
Dragon Models of China recently did the noble thing when one of its models was demonstrated to be out of scale and inaccurate: despite the expense involved in withdrawing a product from sale and retooling the production line, they recalled the product and corrected the faults. This possibly explains why companies like Dragon are the future of the hobby, while a name like Airfix is its past.
On the plus side, where Airfix have released a good kit, the VERY best still stand comparison even today. There just aren't enough of them...
An example of a good Airfix kit? Well, what about the top-secret United States Air Force “black bomber” project, so secret that the Pentagon would not officially admit the plane existed. Cue red faces at the Pentagon when Airfix released the model – which was far more realistic and lifelike than the United States Air Force felt comfortable with. At the time the joke, with some truth to it, was that Airfix had better spies than the KGB… It can be extrapolated from this that the REAL clinching proof of there being no alien spacecraft at Area 51 is that Airfix have never released a model of one!
But these days of glory soon ended.
In 1979, Airfix was an early victim of Thatcherite economics, going bust in the 1979-80 recession.
The rest of the eighties were lean years for Airfix, as the company passed through a variety of receivers, temporary owners, and asset-strippers. Whole kit lines were sold on to meet debts.
For instance, formerly Airfix model railway accessories and rolling stock are now marketed by Dapol models of Llangollen.
The greater part of what WERE the model figure ranges (1:72 military figures) are now owned and sold by HäT-Industrie (a joint German-US company). Some models and figures are now owned by Heller of France.
In recent years some stability seems to have returned to the Airfix marque. They are still selling what was always the core of the kit range - aircraft and tanks/AFV's - and appear to be concentrating on childrens' toys, and acquiring the production rights to film and TV tie-ins, ie the "Wallace and Grommit" and “Chicken Run” movies.
However, in the early 2000’s, new plastic kits have appeared in the firms catalogue for the first time in twenty years. For instance, there is an extremely good American Navy landing craft, as used on D-Day and in the Japanese Pacific Island war. Other new kits in the current catalogue, although not yet released, include specialised engineer versions of the Sherman and Churchill tank. (This researcher, a WW2 buff, is looking forward to their promised Sherman Flail tank, which used lengths of chain welded to a rotating steel drum to lash the ground at a safe distance ahead of an advancing tank, in order to harmlessly detonate any mines in its path)
So maybe Airfix cannot be completely written off yet?
(Although this researcher, who by the way also writes for the "trade press" that reviews and critically assesses new models, would be happy if Airfix did something about the clunkingly old stuff. Some of the oldest Airfix kits are so shoddy and crude by today's standards, that continuing to market them in this form is no service to anyone. Putting elderly offerings into glitzy new packagings which offer the misleading impression that they are new to the market is just.... well, not honest. Upgrading them would be ideal; withdrawing them as saleable goods, if they can't be improved, would come second.)
Breaking News in October/November 2006:-
Humbrol UK of Marfleet, Hull, Humberside, parent company of Airfix Ltd, announce bankruptcy... so yet again Airfix ceases to be a going concern, at just the time when obsevers thought the company had saved itself and by virtue of its own efforts was hauling itself up by its own bootstraps. Alas, the brand new kits in the current catalogue were a false indicator of economic health.
November 2006:- Bought out by Hornby, the model railway people. This is good, as Hornby market their own range of railway-compatible buildings, fixtures, figures, scenics, et c, and have experience with creating and marketing injection-moulded plastic kits. Indeed, this researcher has many a Hornby building in his collection, as things to be fought over and around on the wargames table... so the worlds of civil engineering and not-so-civil military engineering do meet again!
1 “StüG III” – StürmGewehr, or Assault Gun 2 The original Airfix figure sets in 1:76 – to visualize this scale, a human figure would be an inch tall – were released in the late 1950’s and consisted of TV tie-ins, such as the first Robin Hood TV series, Daktari, Tarzan, The High Chaparral, et c. These were accompanied by figures representative of the main players of WW2: British, German, American, Japanese and Russian infantry sets were released in the late 1950’s. Those fuzzy and lumpen 1950’s original figures, if in their original boxes, now command interesting prices among collectors.3 The first-generation Airfix figures from the 1950's remain in mass production today. A Spanish firm with the interesting name of Barcelona Universales Modeles has current title to the moulds. So you can walk into your local model shop and legitimately ask for a BUM Model. Strange but true. 4If anyone feels I am being flippant about the Italian contribution to WW2, please explore the link to "use of tanks in WW2" and scroll down to read my essay on Italy in the Second World War, which I hope offers a deeper and more balanced perspective. 5About that Italian Infantry figure set. All Airfix military sets seemed to work to an unwritten iron law that stipulated a certain number of men had to be posed with their hands raised in abject surrender. It is an ironic fact that the one WW2 infantry figure set, where you might expect the quota of surrendering men to be larger than usual, has no men at all who are posed as surrendering, nor holding their issue helmets on with both hands lest they blow away in a breeze, nor attaching white cloths to their rifles for greater visibility. Nor is there an Italian flag that the modeller might paint in white only, omitting the red and green bands as superfluous to the exercise. Apparently these were made conditions of Italian Army and Ministry of Defence co-operation with Airfix - in return for making uniforms and weapons available to the figure designers, no figures in the set were to be depicted as surrendering, or official assistance would be withdrawn. Evidently the current holders of the Italian martial tradition in the early 1980's were still a little sensitive about the reputation of their wartime predecessors ...
