The Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress is a four-engine heavy bomber aircraft that played a key role for the Allies in World War II. When the prototype B-17 first flew in 1935, a reporter for the Seattle Times was watching and coined the name “Flying Fortress” with his comment, “Why, it’s a flying fortress!” The B-17 was mainly used in the strategic bombing campaign of World War II. PlaneBricks has built a fantastic LEGO version of this famous bomber, complete with the machine guns poking out of clear ‘blisters’ to allow bombardiers and gunners to visualise their targets.

This fantastic model doesn’t just look the part — the tail section has moving flaps and the top section of the fuselage can be lifted to allow PlaneBrick’s engineering skills to be admired from the inside out.

There is a rather harrowing statistic entwined with B-17 history, as out of the 12,731 aircraft produced by Boeing, Douglas, and Lockheed from 1936 until 1945, 8,000 were lost in either combat operations or training accidents.