Missing Nations Pt1: Absent From My Collection

I expect I am not alone in trying to build a diverse collection of model airliners. Obviously nations like the USA, Canada, China, UK, France, Australia etc are well represented in almost any scale but if you want a geographically representative collection then often your choices are rather limited or even non-existant in 1:400. In this 2 part series I plan on taking a look at where the gaps are in my collection and in production in general.

My collection's quite diverse. These are just the non-US parts

I primarily collect classic airliners, which means for me from before 1990. Only my Chinese, Russian and US fleets have a significant portion of post 1990 aircraft with only the first two having much after 2000. If you're looking for a good geographic spread this can be a challenge since the manufacturers are very conservative nowadays and tend to stick to the same bunch of popular nations for their releases. Aeroclassics release a much wider range of airlines than anybody else and have slipped out some relatively obscure nation's airlines over the years. Even so there are some countries that are rather under-represented.

Most geographic areas are well represented. Here's the Caribbean and top of S America section

Countries with 1/400 releases that aren't in my collection - YET!

As of 2017 there are 197 recognised nations, including such newbies as South Sudan, East Timor, Eritrea and Kosovo. I also include Taiwan on this list, though not Macau and Hong Kong (both of which are easily represented anyway).

In part 1 of this series I wanted to look into the gaps in my collection and see if they point towards some obvious choices for new releases. The proviso of all this is of course that some countries are unlikely to ever warrant a release in 1/400. That's a shame as the airlines of smaller less important nations still have made a valuable contribution to air travel.

In this review I'm only looking at existing countries and not extinct ones like South Vietnam. So far of the 197 countries in the world 132 have been represented in 1/400 scale by at least one model. That's a pretty good going. In my collection I have 109 of those nations, which means I'm missing 23. Let's take a look at why and what I'd like to see to help me remedy that situation.

---

Post-Soviet States

Quite a few of the nations came into existence following the collapse of the Soviet Union so technically don't fit within my collection criteria. They often have some nice colourful releases of Soviet types and it is likely that in the future, if I can find the space, I might expand into these nations. These include the following countries with current available releases in brackets:

• Armenia (Armenian IL-86, TU-154, DC-8)
  
• Azerbaijan (AZAL TU-154)
  
• Belarus (Belavia TU-154)
  
• Latvia (Air Baltic F50)
  
• Macedonia (FYROM) (Avioimpex Yak-42)
  
• Turkmenistan (Turkmenistan Airlines IL-76)
  
• Uzbekistan (Uzbekistan IL-86, TU-154 or 787)
  

Slovakia is another recent country. Though technically I do have Slovakian aircraft since I own some CSA models they are more Czech than Slovak. To be honest with the lack of classics from these countries (and working Yak-42 or TU-134 moulds) there isn't a lot of extra aircraft that I'd like to see made. One that would be nice however would be a Latvian - Baltic International Boeing 727-100:

YL-BAE at Frankfurt in 1995. Photo by AeroIcarus from Wikipedia

For Macedonia then Palair Macedonia would make sense - either a TU-154 or F28 or F100:

F100 in 1994 at Dusseldorf. Photo by Konstantin von Wedelstaedt from Wikipedia

---

Model Scarcity

Some releases are just damn hard to find, or the country is rather poorly represented, and therefore I just haven't been able to acquire them yet. This includes the following countries:

• Brunei (Royal Brunei 737-200)
• Bulgaria (Balkan TU-154)
• Gabon (Air Gabon 747-200)
• Guatemala (Aviateca 737-200)
• Paraguay (LAP DC-8-61)
• Qatar (Qatar Airways 747SR)
• Slovenia (Inex Adria DC-9, Adria A320)

Sometimes this is almost by choice. I'd rather not get older DC-8-61s from either Gemini or Aeroclassics. Certainly within the countries above there is some room for further releases - especially Bulgaria.

---

Too Modern

The majority of the remainder have releases but not for aircraft within my collection period:

• Maldives (Maldivian A320)
• Mauritius (Air Mauritius A319 and A350)
  
• Oman (Oman Air A330)
• Vietnam (lots of Vietnam Airlines and Vietjet)
• Yemen (Yemenia 747SP)

Aside from Oman (and I do own some Gulf Air so perhaps I can count them as Omani?) there is good classic material here to still be made. Below is a sample - there's plenty more besides these:

Photo by JetPix from Wikipedia

---

Others

Uganda is a special case since it does have a couple of Das Air Cargo DC-10s in 1/400 but I don't collect freighters often and these are a bit too new anyway. I'd much prefer a Uganda Airlines 707:

Photo by Aldo Bidini from Wikipedia

Afghanistan has also been represented by an Ariana 727 but the aircraft itself is outside my time period and I'd much rather see a DC-10:

---

In part 2 of this series I'll look at nations that have never been represented in 1/400 scale.