Building my first airplane kit in 40-odd years has been an experience, good, bad and ugly. It’s an old 1/72 Testor/Italaeri B-25 kit I’ve had so long I can’t even remember who gave it to me! So far:
The Good: Discovering that the skills I started re-acquiring with the first three 1/700 ships I built transfer readily to airplanes; knowledge of how to fiddle with very tiny parts comes into play when you are attempting your first scratch built cockpit construction; airplanes start to look like “something” a lot sooner than ships do; if you pick a famous airplane, there will usually be a lot of good reference photos.
The Bad: Lots more subassemblies means lots more painting/masking/oh-hell-that-was-supposed-to-be-olive drab-not-gray! moments; making your own decals can be a special kind of purgatory if they keep going translucent on you; rattle cans are exceptionally good at getting paint everywhere, even places you thought you had thoroughly masked off.
The Ugly: Masking canopies, specifically the bombardier’s greenhouse, and having no clue whatsoever if the Bare Metal Foil will come off after multiple coats of paint, gloss coat, and dull coat; painting subassemblies separately and then trying to get the paint lines to match up … doesn’t work. Trust me on that one.