I notified Didier of the damage, and he replied with a typical gallic dramatic flair : "Is a Disaster !!" ... I could almost hear Peter Sellers saying the words in his Inspector Clouseau accent

At this point I was not looking forward to trying to deal with the insurance claim, since I speak no French and Didier has passable but not wonderful English ... and obviously there would be both French and English postal people involved.

Fortunately for me, Didier has teamed up with Peter from Altecare ( [link=http://www.altecare.com/radiocontrol.htm]http://www.altecare.com/radiocontrol.htm[/link]) ; even though I didn't buy my kit through Peter (since I didn't know at the time that he would be a distributor / dealer), Peter has been phenomenally helpful in getting the claim sorted out.

I would expect that kind of help from a dealer who was getting money from me, but since he's someone who gets nothing out of the process (other than satisfaction) I simply can't over-state how impressed I've been with this help. He will certainly get some of my future business.

Since Didier builds these kits one at a time by hand, getting the replacement fuselage kit involved a bit of a wait. About 5 months after my broken kit arrived, I now have a replacement fuselage shell and MOST of the parts needed for progressing with the build.