1/48 Koster Martin Maryland

Gallery Article by Ivan Pliopas on July 14 2003

France National Day

 

The Martin Maryland was created in response to a 1938 U.S. Army Air Corps request for a twin engine light attack aircraft. Other designs entering that same competition were, what later would become, the A-20 and the B-25. Although Martin ended up building a prototype of the Maryland for evaluation purposes, the plane never saw front line service with the American Armed Forces. Instead, it was in the hands of French, British and South African pilots that the Maryland had its moments of glory. In French service, it was know as “Glenn”, and was used by both the Armée de l’Air (Army) and Aéronavale (Navy), virtually from the beginning until the end of WWII. No Maryland is known to have survived to this day.  

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The Koster vac-formed Maryland builds into a nice replica overall. I have not checked the kit dimensions, but the model looks right when finished, at least compared to pictures. It is not very difficult to build, but I would not recommend it as a first vac-formed project, Assembling the transparencies, for example, can be a bit tricky. The kit contains some parts in resin, but these suffer from inaccuracies and lack of detail in some areas (for example, cockpit and nose interior), as well as bubbles (my sample, at least, had this problem). In any case, these items serve as a good basis to add further detail to the model.   

I’ve built my Maryland mostly out-of-the-box. The main improvements that I’ve added were: 1) detaching the rudder and dropping the elevators, 2) replacing the kit engine fronts with resin items from Engine & Things, 3) opening the cowl flaps, and 4) scratchbuilding the upper turret MAC 34 twin machine gun. The model was finished using Lifecolor acrylic paints and decals from my spare box. The dolphin insignia was done in Corel Draw and printed in a White decal sheet using a laser printer.  

The machine depicted is Glenn number 202 belonging to Escadrille 7B (French Navy) operating out of Beirut in July 1941. A side view color profile of this plane can be found in the French magazine Aéro Journal, issue 8 (Aug-Sept 1999), page 19.   

Overall, this was a very enjoyable project; it took me almost one year to complete working an average of 4-6 hours only on weekends.

Ivan Pliopas

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Photos and text © by Ivan Pliopas