About me

I am Wilko Jonker, born in the fifties of the twentieth century in Amsterdam.
At the moment I work at Conclusion.

When did I got infected with the scale modelling virus?
Just like many other men of my age, I used to built every now and than a scale model when I was young.
Sometimes it was a small car or a bi-plane. The bi-plane was often tested for airworthiness, which happened to be very very poor.

For my study at high school we have to read very many books, so we loaned many books at the local library. Among those books, I sometimes took some aviation books with me.
At that time very few books about this subject were available, at least in the Netherlands. It was mainly Hugo Hooftman, who wrote books about Dutch military aviation.
Nowadays there is a lot of criticism on the books he wrote. Historically they are not always correct, but Hugo wrote in a very attractive and enthusiast way.
Especially his stories about the Fokker G-1 made me look for more information and a scale model about this aeroplane.

A local modelling shop in Amsterdam, called Almaro happened to have a vacu formed model produced by Rareplanes.
Unfortunately it was too expensive and to difficult to built for me at that time and I was not an experienced modeller at that time.
The owner of the shop told me that he heard of plans to produce a injected model in Czechoslovakia.
As an alternative I bought a model of the Gloster Meteor 4, a FROG release. This was my first seriously built scale model. The aircraft is still in my collection.

A next model was Grumman F-14 Tomcat released by Airfix. This huge aircraft was well known at that time, because one of these (at that time) very modern aircraft has fallen in sea. The Soviets were very eager to recover this wreck.

Also I have built an AVRO Anson Mk I, also released by Airfix. According to Hugo Hooftman the Ansons of the Dutch Air force where painted yellow. You may understand, that there are lots of colours "Yellow".
I thought the Anson is a military aircraft, so it must not to remarkable, so I mixed yellow with black, so i got a more greyish yellow colour.

Several years later I discovered in the Library some volumes of AVIA, a Dutch aviation magazine, which contained some articles from members of IPMS Netherlands. As a starting modeller I learned lot from these articles.

Several years later, early eighties, I studied at the Technical Highschool in Amsterdam and I worked temporarily at air base Soesterberg. In a modelling shop at Zeist I found some forms from IPMS Netherlands. I sent one of these forms to the Dutch IPMS and became member of IPMS.

I hope you enjoy this web site about Dutch military aviation and scale modelling.