Ju 288C

The Ju 288 was the primary winner of the "Bomber B" program that was to produce a replacement for the Ju 88 and He 111, which were at the time, the main bombing aircraft of the Luftwaffe. . Junkers had the edge as the specification was based largely on a proposal that Junkers had submitted nearly two years earlier know as the EF 73 and it was to serve as a foundation for their entry the Ju 288. While the number assigned to it may make it seem to be a direct decendent of the Ju 88, it was actually a new design and unlike the Ju 188 and Ju 388 did not use common parts from the Ju 88 series.

No fewer than 22 V series aircraft were built, the earliest were equipped with BMW 801 series engines due to persistent development problems with the proposed engines. Many of the prototypes were damaged or destroyed in accidents due to undercarriage failures, hydraulic problems and engine fires. On top of all this the RLM was constantly adding new requirements and requesting changes as the direction of the war changed. All of this dragged on until June of 1943 when the entire "Bomber B" program was abandon owing to the increasing shortages of strategic materials and the effect that launching a new program would have on existing production programs at a critical phase in the conflict. In spite of the cancellation Junkers completed two additional machines which were flown in July of 43. Some flight testing continued through the Summer of 1944 by which time at least 17 of the 22 prototypes had crashed while engaged in flight development

The Kit

The Huma kit represents the V103 aircraft which was to have been the prototype for the C-1 series of aircraft. Due to the constant development problems with the originally proposed Jumo 222 engines, the V103 was equipped with DB 610 engines, which were two DB 605's coupled together like those that was used in the He 177. The V103 made its first flight in the Spring of 1943. Problems that had been encountered on the V101 and 102 were eliminated. This was the first Ju 288 to have fully equipped weapons stations. I had already started building this kit when I wrote this review so there are no photos of the sprues but there are some in the inbox review listed below. The kit gets reasonably good write ups and has enough internal detail to suit me in 1/72 so the plan is to build it out of box with only a few hand made extras.

Links to kit build or reviews

A review / build can be found here.

An inbox review can be found here in case you wish to see someone else's opinion on the kit.

References

"Black Cross Volume 2 Junkers Ju 288 / 388 / 488" by Karl-Heinz Regnat

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Updated 5/10/08