Tag Archives: Aircraft

Aerospace LEGO enthusiast nails hammerhead aircraft design

Capturing the subtle curves of an aircraft’s wings and fuselage in LEGO takes incredible skill. Seeing the lines in Damien Labrousse‘s “Shark Fighter” aircraft, one can’t help but sit up and take notice. The ever-so slight tapering from 6 studs wide at the cockpit to 10 at the rear is masterfully done. The wings and flaps are also top gun design. Damien based his model on a piece of concept art from E Wo Kaku Peter, and the results perfectly capture the inspiration’s silhouette, while making a few creative deviations that help the model shine in LEGO. In a fitting callback for this nautically named work, it shares the same registry number as the LEGO City Seaplane.

Shark Fighter

Cherry Pie takes to the skies

It’s finally a nice day in the Pacific Northwest and this LEGO creation by Cowboy Joe reminds me that it’s a great day for flying. All I need is a biplane, a hangar, the money to have both, and the know-how to fly such a magnificent plane. I guess I’ll have to settle for admiring this Technic marvel from the safety of the internet. It’s called Cherry Pie and my opinion says it’s the most cherry thing I’ve seen all day; and I’ve seen a YouTube video of a school marching band covering Crazy Train. Unless this is a well-known builder going incognito under a different name, this would seem to be the first time we’ve covered this builder’s work so let’s give Cowboy Joe The Brothers Brick Bumb they deserve!

Cherry Pie

This sleek fighter jet will answer your need for speed

Fighter jet aerodynamics are tricky to render in brick form, but this LEGO F-14A Tomcat by our own Ralph Savelsberg pulls it off with a variety of sloped and angled elements, including the trans-clear bricks that form the cockpit.  The Tomcat’s characteristic swept-back wings are represented with meticulously chosen angled plates. Adding to the authenticity are the missiles stowed beneath the wings and the antenna pieces used for the airspeed sensor probe beneath the cockpit. Not pictured: a highway to the danger zone.

VF-41 Black Aces F-14A Tomcat with a few tweaks

There’s not much LEG(O)room on Flight 714 to Sydney

A new LEGO builder on Flickr, by the name of Aero Explorer, is living up to their name with a neat model of a fantastical plane. Fantastical? Yes! Although it may look like real enough, this is a prototype private jet that appeared in one of the weirder Tintin comics: Flight 714 to Sydney. The parachute on the back is the biggest clue to its fanciful design. Even I know that when planes have parachutes, they’re normally kept on the inside. Anyway, this is a cracker of a model. I really like the way the fuselage tapers towards the nose…

Lego Carreidas 160 Jet

… And we get a bit of a clue as to how the shaping was achieved here. You can also see that there’s just about enough space for an interior. It sleek profile is only a few studs wide, so it’s impressive that minifigures can sit in it at all, never mind with this level of detail! It might be a bit cramped, though. I can say from experience that flying to Sydney with minimal legroom is not much fun… Hopefully the minifigure Tintin is a bit more resilient than me!

Lego Carreidas 160 Jet

The golden age of air travel rendered in silver

Nowadays, flying economy class isn’t much fun. In the early seventies though, during the golden age of air travel, things were decidedly more luxurious. Case in point, the American Airlines DC-10 “Luxury Liner” built by BigPlanes.

American Airlines DC-10 Luxury Liner by BigPlanes.

His model, built using roughly 20,000 Lego parts, represents one of the first of the type to enter service, in 1971. Back then, American Airlines aircraft were mostly silver and so is the model, which is pretty amazing given the limited number of LEGO parts in that color. It also has a motorized retractable undercarriage and a full interior in funky seventies colors. It includes an in-flight lounge for the coach class passengers! Such on-board luxury did not last long, though. By the end of the decade airliners started cramming as many seats into their planes as possible and the golden era of air travel was over.

The Mil Mi-24 means business. Serious attack helicopter business!

If you see this hovering out your window chances are you’re in some deep trouble. It has a capacity for eight troops so you know things are about to get hairy. Thankfully for the rest of us, we can enjoy this LEGO replica built by Stefan Johannson from the relative comfort of our homes. Even as a LEGO model, this thing oozes menace! I particularly like the sag of the rotor blades. Initially introduced by the Soviet Airforce in 1972, this timeless gunship is currently being used by fifty-eight countries and has served in dozens of skirmishes, including the current Russian invasion of Ukraine.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/stej123/52738396487/

This particular model is sporting Ukrainian colors so there is a high probability its real-life counterpart is defending its people and giving those invaders the business. Serious attack helicopter business! News reports cite that the resilient Ukrainian people have been successful in taking down Russian forces with pickled vegetable jars and farm equipment. I can only imagine what they can do with this.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/stej123/52738916176/

An itsy-bitsy SR-71 Blackbird

Don’t let its size fool you! This teensy LEGO SR-71 Blackbird by Greyson is a mighty recon machine from the factories of Lockheed Martin. Even while working in a monochromatic palette, this plane still feels dynamic, a perfect recreation of its real-life kin. Each wedge plate feels perfectly placed, and the shaping on the fuselage is all the better for Greyson’s excellent use of the katana minifig accessory. I even like the shaping on its gray stand: a simple bit that only accentuates the clever design of the micro aircraft.

Baby Blackbird

A teeny-tiny Typhoon airstrike

LEGO builder Greyson proves you don’t need a metric crap-ton of bricks to build something neat. Here’s an adorable RAF Typhoon built from seemingly just over twenty parts. We salute you, Grayson!

Tiny Typhoon

A new fighter for a new age.

Devid VII delivers a devastating desert destroyer with this high-tech hover vehicle. The insectoid shape calls to mind the Dune ornithopters, but the markings suggest this is a future Earth military vehicle, rather than an otherworldly piece of technology. Wherever it originates from, Devid’s done an amazing job with not just the build, but the small vignette that supports it. Thanks to the angle of the ship and the dust cloud it’s kicking up, we can practically hear the hover engines as it speeds past us.

Aku MR-01

By desert, Biplane

Intrepid reader, I report from deep within the desert quarter where we find Robert4168 has revisited a classic LEGO theme to present Baron Von Barron’s Biplane. The stylistic flourishes that make 1998’s 5928 Bi-Wing Baron a classic set can be found here, recreated using new parts and techniques in this build. Robert has repurposed modern weapons to serve as the biplane’s machine guns, which work incredibly well, as does the textured desert landscape the Barron sails across! But what impresses this Adventurers fan the most is the trailing map and binoculars, just like the original box art!

5928: Bi-Wing Baron

It hasn’t helped the Baron find the Re-Gou Ruby though, I wonder what happened there…

Viper and Hornet revamped

Time flies. It has been 14 years since my LEGO aircraft were first featured on The Brothers Brick. Perhaps surprisingly, I still have most of the models I had back then. However, although I updated several of them over the years, my F-16 Fighting Falcon, commonly known as a Viper, and my F/A-18 Hornet were now really showing their age. My jet models usually have a retractable undercarriage and that takes up quite a bit of space. As a result, the fuselages on the old versions were about a stud too wide for their scale. So, my main goal was to make those narrower. This obviously requires major changes and, rather than updating the existing models once more, I decided to rebuild them from scratch.

Using curved parts, wedge plates, and various brackets that didn’t exist when I built the originals, I further improved their shape. Some things have stayed the same, though. Lately, I have built some studless models, but it is no secret that I do like studs on my models. To fit with my older models, these two still have them. And while the old versions may have been old, they had features that I liked, such as the design of the cockpit canopy on the F-16 and much of the design of the main landing gear on the Hornet, so I copied those. While I have become somewhat fatter as I have reached middle age, my models are now slimmer and far more elegant. And with these changes, they’re good to go for another decade.

Take flight with Crimson Squadron and build your own sky-fi aircraft

I’ve always been a fan of Sky-Fi aircraft. It’s a glorious retro-futuristic look, typified by the Xbox classic Crimson Skies, and the creations of LEGO builders such as Jon Hall and John Lamarck. To pull myself out of a recent bout of builder’s block, I set myself a challenge — to build a series of Sky-Fi aircraft, in a common colour scheme, with a similar overall style, but each design different. Crimson Squadron is what emerged over the next few weeks…

lego sky-fi plane

The first of the squadron’s aircraft to roll off the production line was this twin-engined beast — the Bulldog. It established the signature elements which sit across the rest of the fleet: the red and chequerboard livery, a whiff of a muscle car from the up-front intakes, a bubble canopy for a fun retro feel, and an overall super-condensed chunky chibi look. I was pleased with how the Bulldog turned out and immediately set to work once more.

See more of the Squadron and instructions to build your own