Bent Wing was one of several small Gobots released exclusively in America and Europe, and skipped in Bandai's home territory of Japan (though it was, most likely, originally designed as a prototype for the Machine Robo line). He does bear a Bandai stamp, and came out in 1986 in the West.

American and European versions had slightly different sticker sheets - the American one had a yellow band around the nose, while Europe got an orange one. Bent Wing was one of the few figures who managed to miss out on the TV series, the poor sod. In 1993, Bandai reissued him in Europe (with the orange band) as part of the Robo Machines line, where he was designated simply as 'Aircraft'.

Bent Wing is very much a companion piece of Ace, being another World War II fighter, in this case the Chance Vought F4U Corsair. The actually body shape doesn't seem quite as sleek as the real plane, though this may be my memory playing tricks.

That said, it's not a bad little plane despite the large bumps in the wings that allow them to fold. The colour scheme is both excellent and realistic, the only other problem being the undercarriage making the plane sit too close to the ground. There's also the scale, though it's not a fault with the toy - it's smaller than Ace, but larger than Zero, which is a shame if you want to display the plane modes together.

However, Bent Wing does avoid the chunky feel there is to Ace. It's a respectable stab at a nice aircraft

The transformation is interesting, again - three WWII fighters with basically the same configuration, and Bandai use three completely different conversion sequences. That's commendable when, at around the same time, Takara were banging out the interchangeable Aerialbots.

The robot mode has the classic Gobot "weird, ungainly but oddly cool" look to it - Bent Wing has two halves of aircraft tail for arms, and looks about as mobile as the Great Wall of China, but he's still rather interesting... Articulation is limited to the arms, and sadly by this stage we're on nearly all-plastic materials, but he looks really sharp.

For some reason, the fact he has a propeller blade on top of his head is something I find absolutely awesome. I suspect the novelty can soon wear off for others, though.