Westland Whirlwind from

"A Hard Day's Night"

by Jonathan Strickland

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Have you every watched a movie and said to yourself, "Hey!  I could build a model of that!"  Well, it happened to me when I got the DVD of the Beatles' "Hard Day's Night".  Once I realized that Italeri made a nice 1/72nd scale H-19/S-55 then I was off.  But I needed to know a bit of history about the actual airframe first.  Turns out that the British version of the H-19 is known as the Westland Whirlwind, and the the Whirlwind in question had the civil code G-ANFH.  Several inquiries on the web provided color pictures of G-ANFH from 1964. 

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"A Hard Day's Night" was shot in black and white and I would have never guessed from those images that G-ANFH was primarily Orange. I built the kit straight out of the box with one exception.  A friend vacuformed a dome for me to represent the perspex bubble fitted to one of the left window ports.  This was intended for movie cameras.  In fact, G-ANFH was also used as a platform for aerial camera work during the film.  Some of the scenes from the "Can't Buy Me Love" sequence was shot from G-ANFH on a camera with low battery power.  The cameraman thought the film was wasted, but director Richard Lester loved the sped up action and used it in the final cut (which spawned the "Monkees" romps and other countless music videos).

     G-ANFH was owned by British European Airways (BEA) and it was a simple task to make the BEA logo read BEATLES on one side of the airframe.  (Another friend made the BEA and TLES decals for me.)

Thanks to Bill Bosworth and William Everhart for their help with this model.

Jonathan Strickland

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Photos and text © by Jonathan Strickland