Welcome to the June Wings900 Family newsletter. In this month's newsletter we make an important announcement to our community about The Wings900 Family future; we introduce a new feature which we will be doing every month; and we talk about usual stuff that's happening on our sites. 

Take Off for our New Partnership 

We know that over the past few weeks you've noticed some new people doing stuff on the sites, as well as new features coming in a bit more regularly than usual. You'll remember that we mentioned a while ago that we'd done a tie-up with the guys over at Toy Collector. Well, all the new things are part of that tie-up. We're not going to be removing anything from the site; the forums aren't going to change and the community will stay the same, but we're taking advantage of some of the features they have, like blogs or videos, and some of the technology they're developing - for example, their ToyPedia setup which we want to eventually adopt for our databases and collection management. The intention is to enhance the Wings900 experience through this.

We've also created a new testing environment so that everything new can be tested off-site, to make sure it all works before bringing it in (Todd seems to have much greyer hair now after the recent site issues...) We hope you like all the new stuff we're adding and, of course, we'll be looking for your feedback on what you do and don't like on an ongoing basis. Because after all, these are community sites and nothing is as important as the community. When we get closer with our work on the database we'll also be looking for 10-20 volunteers to make sure what we have
built really works, so if you're interested, please get in touch.
 
If you've got any questions, or want to talk about any of the developments, we're opening a conversation here in General Squawk Talk called Wings900 Family Looks to the Future, where you can ask and discuss.

On the subject of Other Stuff, the blogging feature we announced last month is fully functional now, and there's a help section available here for anyone who wants it. Also, we've now got this great new section we've called Industry News, where retailers, manufacturers etc can announce any news, new releases or similar very easily by posting them themselves.

Member of the Month

Here's a new regular feature - each month, we'll be putting the spotlight on a member who's contributed to the site in some special way. Our first is Greg, AKA lufthansa340, who you'll all know as one of our Mods. He's from New York, is a teacher and coach, collects 1:500, 1:400, 1:200 and 1:100 and has been on the sites since April 2007.
 
Greg likes the community feel of the sites, enjoys talking to others around the world with a common interest and giving back to the community through his work on the sites. In the future, he'd like to see more 70's and 80's stuff in 1:200, more quality and accuracy and world peace. We think he might get the first two. Thanks, Greg, for being a great asset to the sites. You can read the full interview here.
 
Now let's take a look at what's going on on the sites themselves...

Wings900

In the Blogs section on Wings900, we've had a 1:87 airport construction update, an extremely cool 1937 Bugatti plane that's just as outrageous as the cars, and some historical background on Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow.

On the forum front, in General Squawk Talk, we've got a feedback thread for suggestions about the new Blogs, some congratulations for all the fathers out there on the recent occasion of Fathers' Day, a big thank you to Wings900 from one member (hint: we like threads like this...), a woman who lives in a 747 and a really nice thread about on how collectors relate to their models.

Over in 1:500,  we've had an appreciation thread for 1:500 Trijets, a great new release in the form of Dragonair's 25th Anniversary B-HYF A330-300 (with pics!), plus some love for Scandinavian Airlines and Italy. Going up a size, in 1:400, some latest acquisitions (whole lot of those!), Flightline 400 747 Thai International and 777 Virgin Australia models and a cool Mexicana fleet.

In 1:200, meanwhile, we've got some great photos of the Flightline 200 727 TAA, Western Models Trans Canada Airlines Super Connie with tip tanks and new colors on the Air India B747-400. Lots of nice stuff in Customs, too, including a Philippine Airlines A380 and a FIFA-logo'd SAA A300.

 
www.AirlineMuseum.com

 

 

 

DA.C

Over on DA.C, we've got a burning question about DA.C T-shirts and lots of great 1:400-ness - JC Wings' China Southern Shorts 360, Phoenix Sia A380s, Lufthansa A340-600 and Babybus A310.

In 1:200, there's been Hobby Master's KLM L-188 Electra, an Eagle addition, a very retro KLM B737-800 and Virgin Atlantic's A340-300 and AV200 B757-200 Britannia G-BYAJ.

Military models meanwhile, included this great 1:48 scale A-37B Nyang kit with added detail and fantastic pics of the RNLAF F-16 Demo Team "Orange Lion". And if Customs are more your scene, over there, we've got a whole lot of great works-in-progress this month, including balsa wood A330-200, 747-200 and 747-400 models.

Scale600 & Toy Collector

Finally, on our smallest-scale forum, we've had questions about the Schabak 747-8 (or lack of one), a face-off between the Herpa Magic and Schabak A380s and some Schabak rarities.
 
And elsewhere, on Toy Collector, noted toy soldier-makers Thomas Gunn announced their first model aircraft in 1:30 scale and German model company Schreiber-Bogen took the concept of paper planes to a whole new level.

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