A U-Wing Crash-Lands on a Smoking Tropical Shore — Print & Oil Painting

Nothing has been hit yet. The ship is still airborne, nose up, rolled hard so that the port wing tip is a metre off the shallows, and a sheet of white water is being torn up along the right of the frame where the wash has caught the surface. Two thin vapour trails spin off the wing tips. The next second is not in the picture.

Its foils are locked aft. On this type they swing forward to settle onto a landing site and back for flight, so a machine arriving over a beach in the rearward configuration is not landing at all: it is still flying, and running out of room to do it in.

The hull is worth the detail it has been given. Tan and gunmetal panels with a long blue stripe down the flank, white ring intakes at the front of both engine nacelles, a heavily framed cockpit glazing at the nose, black scoring around the vents. Every surface is dulled and used.

The shore behind is doing the narrative work. A column of oily black smoke climbs the whole left half of the canvas from something burning out of frame, palms lean over a white sand bar beneath it, dark rocks stand in ankle-deep water in the foreground, and to the right the weather is completely clear: blue sky, bright cumulus, an untouched sea.

These were not fighters. The type existed to put troops on the ground and take fire while doing it, and the tropical beaches of that campaign are where most of them ended. Part of our Star Wars collection, alongside a flight coming down onto open water in formation and the figure waiting at the other end of that mission.