The Polikarpov I-153 at the Military Aviation Museum in Virginia Beach, Virginia is a flyable restored example that is perhaps less authentic than say, the one in Paris – at least in equipment – for safety reasons.  It is however the ‘real deal’ having been recovered from a swamp in Russia so the basic details & layout should be correct and can be useful to the modeler. When modeling this subject, I’ve been a bit confounded by the landing gear mechanism but these pictures will help me finally get that sorted. There is a great deal of imagery of the I-153 on the web, as a Google image search will show, but ‘walk-arounds’ are scarce. Still fun to see such an unusual subject “in the flesh”.