After my VOBG project, I decided to take up something a little more ambitious. On and off over the last several months, I’ve been working on a significantly larger diorama. While it’s not complete yet, this weekend I reached a milestone and was eager to get some planes on it, take pictures, and share them with this community.
As with VOBG, I wanted a subject personal to me. I grew up in the Bay Area, and I fondly remember family trips out of SFO. I wanted to invoke some of that nostalgia with this diorama, but without committing myself to building a scale replica of SFO itself. So, I chose to design a fictional airport, with ICAO code of KVSR, set in a fictional, nameless West Coast city somewhere between San Francisco and Portland. In my narrative, KVSR is a transpacific gateway, and, in the 1990s, became a spillover hub for United to relieve pressure on SFO and LAX. The city (like the Bay Area where I’m from) hosts several Asian diaspora communities, in addition to having strong business ties to Japan in particular, supporting a strong market for VFR and business travel. By the 2000s and 2010s, traffic to European and Middle East destinations began to pick up as well.
In this first phase of the project, I completed a 9-gate international concourse and the surrounding aprons and taxiways. According to my narrative, this concourse was opened in 1993 to accommodate the rise in international traffic at KVSR, as well as to serve United’s hub operations. I wanted to build something that wouldn’t look anachronistic, whether I displayed aircraft from the 90s up to the present day. The first set of pictures I took take place in around 1997. I’ve generally tried to be period-accurate with my choice of aircraft on display, though I have taken some liberties. In particular, since I don’t have any United 747-400s in the Battleship livery, at least none on a good, modern mould, I’ve chosen to display my Rainbow Tulip 747s instead.
I designed and 3D-printed the terminal building myself, in addition to hand-painting the base. I got the jetways from Clipper Models, and the GSE from AvGeek Models. Feedback welcome!
Here’s an overview showing the diorama in its current state. In the unpainted area on the bottom, I plan to find some modeling grass, and in the unpainted L-shaped area on the top-right, I plan to put a domestic concourse and connector building, which I’m currently in the process of designing.
United 747-400 tails on an overcast late morning.
JAL’s JA8915 loading up and getting ready to head across the Pacific to Tokyo-Narita. An EVA Air 747 sits in the background, having arrived from Taipei.
China Eastern’s B-2174, outbound to Shanghai.
As with VOBG, I wanted a subject personal to me. I grew up in the Bay Area, and I fondly remember family trips out of SFO. I wanted to invoke some of that nostalgia with this diorama, but without committing myself to building a scale replica of SFO itself. So, I chose to design a fictional airport, with ICAO code of KVSR, set in a fictional, nameless West Coast city somewhere between San Francisco and Portland. In my narrative, KVSR is a transpacific gateway, and, in the 1990s, became a spillover hub for United to relieve pressure on SFO and LAX. The city (like the Bay Area where I’m from) hosts several Asian diaspora communities, in addition to having strong business ties to Japan in particular, supporting a strong market for VFR and business travel. By the 2000s and 2010s, traffic to European and Middle East destinations began to pick up as well.
In this first phase of the project, I completed a 9-gate international concourse and the surrounding aprons and taxiways. According to my narrative, this concourse was opened in 1993 to accommodate the rise in international traffic at KVSR, as well as to serve United’s hub operations. I wanted to build something that wouldn’t look anachronistic, whether I displayed aircraft from the 90s up to the present day. The first set of pictures I took take place in around 1997. I’ve generally tried to be period-accurate with my choice of aircraft on display, though I have taken some liberties. In particular, since I don’t have any United 747-400s in the Battleship livery, at least none on a good, modern mould, I’ve chosen to display my Rainbow Tulip 747s instead.
I designed and 3D-printed the terminal building myself, in addition to hand-painting the base. I got the jetways from Clipper Models, and the GSE from AvGeek Models. Feedback welcome!
Here’s an overview showing the diorama in its current state. In the unpainted area on the bottom, I plan to find some modeling grass, and in the unpainted L-shaped area on the top-right, I plan to put a domestic concourse and connector building, which I’m currently in the process of designing.
United 747-400 tails on an overcast late morning.
JAL’s JA8915 loading up and getting ready to head across the Pacific to Tokyo-Narita. An EVA Air 747 sits in the background, having arrived from Taipei.
China Eastern’s B-2174, outbound to Shanghai.
