Review: 60413 Fire Rescue Plane
Posted by SetToBuild,
Only you can prevent forest fires. But if you’re not there, LEGO City’s fire department can now step in with 60413 Fire Rescue Plane to battle the blaze.
The five-year Fire Plane drought is finally over. 2019 was the last time we saw a fire plane—that was a ‘water-scoop’ seaplane design with floats, whereas now we’ve got an airtanker design with landing gear. The new fire plane is filled with features to help the firefighting fan in your life fend off the flames.
Summary
60413 Fire Rescue Plane, 478 pieces.
£54.99 / $54.99 / €59.99 | 11.5p/11.5c/12.6c per piece.
Buy at LEGO.com »
An enjoyable addition to your firefighting fleet. As the kids say, this LEGO set is fire!
- Fun play feature
- Very swooshable
- None
The set was provided for review by LEGO. All opinions expressed are those of the author.
Minifigures
This style of firefighter uniform has had subtle changes in the 11 years it has been in production. In 2021, the red collar appeared, assumed to indicate a new role or ranking. Now, an additional safety harness has been attached to the torso and the legs. Surprisingly, the person flying the plane is without this extra harness!
As well as the identity card detail on the front, these harnesses have one big pouch in place of the clip on the original torso. As I’ve stated in another City Fire review, the optional hair pieces are an exceptionally welcome inclusion to these City sets.
Gone are the days when minifigures got the same helmet no matter the role. In the past, whether you were a castle soldier, police personnel, or an astronaut, you got some variation of the iconic classic space helmet. Now, we get custom-moulded helmets depending on whether the character is controlling a jetpack, fighting a fire, or piloting a plane!
We’ve seen a few versions of a jetpack-like craft in the past. 60373 Fire Rescue Boat took place at sea, so it made sense that a hydro jetpack was included. However, this one has a trans-red 1x2 plate and grille, making it appear jet-fueled. This doesn’t seem safe in an area that is already on fire!
The Completed Model
The plane’s modern design will feel familiar to many, as its shaping is dominated by the recognisable front canopy piece and vertical stabiliser. The stubbier nose piece does feel more realistic than the older design.
The printed discs within the engine are a nice touch. While I appreciate the nostalgia of the long-lived 4x9 wing piece, it’s a shame that the wings lack 60217 Fire Plane’s aerofoil shaping. For the size of this plane, the wing tips beyond the large wing-mounted engines feel very thin and flat. Perhaps some aviation experts can let us know which is more realistic in the comments.
Corrugated pipes connect the main water tank at the rear to the smaller hoses at the front of the plane. Covering the base of the tank, design:50334 adds some unique shaping while receiving the hose connection via its click hinge. This element has changed a few times, but to me, it’ll always belong to 7131 Anakin's Podracer.
The six included ‘water’ bricks loaded into the top of the fuselage. The teal 2x2 tile just below the hatch cleverly makes loading the water into the plane foolproof and avoids jams to the release mechanism. The only downside of this is the precision required to load the water pieces one by one, which may frustrate some people.
Pulling back on this handle releases a single ‘water’ brick and letting go loads the next one in the queue. I found it comfortable to hold and operate with one hand, but humans with smaller hands will appreciate that there is a handle on both sides. The large ‘water’ bricks are satisfying to play with and easy to pick up with large or small hands, so I’m glad to see this style maintained.
There are two spots in the front of the plane for the plane’s pilot and an operator. The cockpit has some great details, including the yoke, control boards, and levers. Even the room behind the main cockpit has its own set of controls. It was surprising to see the rubber band exposed behind the operator’s seat. I’m not sure what could have been done differently, but it feels unusual not to have this hidden away in the build.
After some fiddling, the jetpack and its pilot can be squeezed into the rear of the plane, but their legs need to be folded back to fully close the hatch.
The douse-the-fire game is a lot of fun! The fire closest to the forest floor is difficult to hit with the water elements, but perhaps this is simply educating us on the difficulties of firefighting on mountainous terrain in the real world. Without any civilians to depict human error in the scene for this set, the forest fire in this set is apparently naturally caused. Finally, a minor observation as a Californian: dark tan plates and sand green leaves might have illustrated a flammable dry forest better. Perhaps I’m just attempting to manifest the wonderful fern element in these colours!
A relatively run-of-the-mill array of extra parts remain when the set is finished—although notably the larger 1x2 rounded tile also makes the cut to be a spare, and the additional vibrant yellow tile doesn’t go amiss.
Conclusion
This set’s pricing favours US audiences more than others in the wave, at £54.99 / $54.99 / €59.99. Customers in the UK, however, may be disappointed that this doesn’t emulate 60217 Fire Plane with its staggeringly different $59.99 and £34.99 price tags, albeit for 20% fewer pieces.
This set has excellent playability, and is very swooshable. The landing gear does tend to get knocked off quite easily, but is not essential to the play experience and the rest of the plane is very robust. The roomy fuselage efficiently packs in two seats, two storage boxes, a water mechanism and a rear hatch—the design effort to achieve this is certainly welcome.
106 likes
22 comments on this article
This is a perfect City Set. Great build, great figs, great play features, and dare I say great price?
I'm really excited to pick this up! I kinda want to get 4209 and 60217 just so I can compare them all!
It looks rather expensive to me for less play features. The last one was £35 for a plane, 3 figures, 2 pieces of landscape and a small truck. This is £55 for a plane, 3 figures and one piece of scenery. Sure, each build uses slightly more parts but that is almost a 60% price increase and less play features.
It all makes sense: with the increasing number of environmental disasters, these types of machines are increasingly in line with the experiences of children. Lego could create a special theme around this phenomenon, consisting of a boat to collect plastic from the sea, a drone for cloud seeding, an earthquake-resistant building, etc.
If only it were funny...
For a fairly realistic plane, the jet pack is goofy and dumb. Apart from that, a lovely set and great review.
Side note, I appreciate the photo highlight showing the handle. More of this in reviews please!
Jet pack is the best part of the set! Silly but fun!
Otherwise seems like a pretty good play set with some nice features. The angled stud shooters look a bit odd though, and indeed it seems a bit pricey.
@CCC said:
"It looks rather expensive to me for less play features. The last one was £35 for a plane, 3 figures, 2 pieces of landscape and a small truck. This is £55 for a plane, 3 figures and one piece of scenery. Sure, each build uses slightly more parts but that is almost a 60% price increase and less play features."
60217 also has a badger in memory?
@BeaR_the_Builder said:
"It all makes sense: with the increasing number of environmental disasters, these types of machines are increasingly in line with the experiences of children. Lego could create a special theme around this phenomenon, consisting of a boat to collect plastic from the sea, a drone for cloud seeding, an earthquake-resistant building, etc.
If only it were funny..."
As someone who has worked in forestry, including forest fire and emergency support operations, and got my basic forest fire training, this is not a bad idea, even if it's indeed a bit sad to have come to this.
Environmental research and disaster/pollution relief and mitigation could be an interesting variation on explorers/scientists we have seen roaming the sea and land from the jungle to the arctic in recent Lego City years.
But I'm sure Lego would not want to open that potential can of worms, though.
@fy222 said:
" @CCC said:
"It looks rather expensive to me for less play features. The last one was £35 for a plane, 3 figures, 2 pieces of landscape and a small truck. This is £55 for a plane, 3 figures and one piece of scenery. Sure, each build uses slightly more parts but that is almost a 60% price increase and less play features."
60217 also has a badger in memory?"
It's a skunk.
We got the Futuron helmet in neon yellow for the first time before a new set with a regular yellow helmet again
I have 60217 and it is excellent. This plane looks like a worthy successor. And shockingly, the price for a City set in the US is not absurd. I may still wait for a discount, but it's on my radar now (pun intended :).
@Zink said:
"They could've doubled the figs with that price tag."
That price has successfully doused my desire for the extremely rare, limited edition police and fire sets.
@560heliport said:
" @fy222 said:
" @CCC said:
"It looks rather expensive to me for less play features. The last one was £35 for a plane, 3 figures, 2 pieces of landscape and a small truck. This is £55 for a plane, 3 figures and one piece of scenery. Sure, each build uses slightly more parts but that is almost a 60% price increase and less play features."
60217 also has a badger in memory?"
It's a skunk."
SKUNK! Everybody stay back and remain calm!
@ao_ka said:
"We got the Futuron helmet in neon yellow for the first time before a new set with a regular yellow helmet again "
Curious, if the "Futuron" helmet isn't the "regular" helmet, then what is the regular? "Futuron" has been in about 700 sets, as many as the next top 20 helmets combined, including Batman, Vader, and Iron Man
To me the plane looks strange with the helicopter canopy piece. For a plane I would prefer the other, older version.
Then again it's a kids set, and I guess they couldn't care less about such details.
@fakespacesquid said:
" @ao_ka said:
"We got the Futuron helmet in neon yellow for the first time before a new set with a regular yellow helmet again "
Curious, if the "Futuron" helmet isn't the "regular" helmet, then what is the regular? "Futuron" has been in about 700 sets, as many as the next top 20 helmets combined, including Batman, Vader, and Iron Man"
I call that way because the classic helmet for me is the Classic Space one and Futuron was the first (sub)theme to use that helmet design
I like the subtle consistency with aircraft designs, as this aircraft has a similar general layout to the one in 60210 (particularly the engines and wings). It's close enough to fit in well and not feel like yet another radical shift in direction for the City aviation industry, but still different enough to work well as its own design and not feel like just an altered version of the Police one.
Undersized wings, but otherwise a solid set.
"Surprisingly, the person flying the, that'ds plane is without this extra harness!" Do they really need one, though? Aren't the harnesses for things the pilot wouldn't be doing?
@AverageChimaEnjoyer said:
"I'm really excited to pick this up! I kinda want to get 4209 and 60217 just so I can compare them all!"
You should definitely track down 4209, that's an awesome set.
It'd be cool to have some wildlife.
Would be great that Lego have some more realistic sets, fire plane and similar, for us AFOLs, like sets 4954 , 31052 , 31079 , 31083 , 31085 (truck), 31119 , 7739 , 60166 maybe under Creator theme, get back subtheme Expert for this kind of sets. Where could go cars that are not attractive to go under Speed Champions (ORV's, SW, sedans...)
Really appreciate the highlights in this review! Really love seeing the spares and the interior mechanics shown off as well, I’d love to see more of that in these reviews! Very well done.