Detailing Your Pilots
Making Them Look Real
You can ruin the realistic appearance of a beautiful scale helicopter with a "not so realistic looking" pilot. We spend hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars building scale helicopters that would make anyone envious, only to ruin it all with an inappropriate pilot. I sometimes build my pilots first to keep me motivated while building the helicopter they will reside in, lol.
If you are building in 1/6th scale, the sky is the limit. There are outlets that cater to 1/6th scale figures, offering many different looking heads, bodies, hands or gloved hands, footwear, clothing and many other accessories. If you are building a model with more than one figure, you DON'T want them all to look the same. You can add facial hair, sunglasses or caps, or you can change the heads completely. Blackopstoys.com offers many different "head sculpts" to choose from.
Adding Patches
A great way to add realistic detail to your figures is adding "patches" to their clothing or flight suits. I search the internet for the appropriate patches, download them to the laptop, size them accordingly, print them on the wife's office printer, cut them out and glue them on with Elmer's Glue.
Female Pilots
Building female pilots is an option as well; I have built several. I recently added one for fun in my last 407 build. The female figures have many "options" available also, lol.
If you're building 1/5 or 1/4, then the options get smaller. Warbirdpilots.com offers figures in several sizes, and with a little work they can become very realistic. Premierpilots.com caters to the 1/4 scale and has a couple of different looking heads available. I used their "Bruce" figure in my 1/5th Hughes 500 and added a beard using epoxy and micro-ballons and when painted it came out satisfactory. TailoredPilots in the UK has many different sizes and VERY realistic pilots that you see in a lot of "high end" models.
Building in any scale seriously consider custom painting the flight helmets, makes the world of difference. I have even added a "stogie" to one of my gunners, (WarBirdPilots figure), lol. I have included several pictures of pilots that I have made for my models. Use your pictures and, with a little imagination, Make Them Look Real!!!
