Recently someone posted the attached amazing photo of the late, great rockstar Roy Orbison on an Airfix Facebook page. He's apparently accepting a big gift pile of Airfix aircraft kits including the then-new B-17, the Wellington, Lancaster and others. An attractive "bird" is is handing them to him. All but one of those models is 1/72 scale, which was not widely adopted in the U.S. at the time. I think those would be pretty rare and expensive import kits back home, and it's obvious that he is very happy to get them! (I wonder what the customs duty was?) Obviously a publicity photo, I wonder what the circumstances of this photo were? I suspect that that this happened while he was in the U.K. for the May-June1963 tour with then-rising Beatles. Someone posted that this this photo was published in a 1963 issue of the Airfix magazine, but I have looked through all of them on the Internet Archive site (See sample here: https://archive.org/details/airfix-magazine-apr-63/ and I do not see it. It's of course well known that Roy was an expert, enthusiastic aircraft historian and modeler. There's an interview with him in some fan mag in the '60s where he holds forth on the Martin Baker M.B. 5 as his favorite plane! Who but a fanatic would have even known about it back then? I wonder what happened to his collection. Man, I would love to have a model airplane built by Roy Orbison. Wow. https://www.modelaviationdigital.com/modelaviation/november_2018/MobilePagedArticle.action?articleId=1433640#articleId1433640 Can anyone shed light on this?
