A Highly Controversial LEGO City Set Causes A Rift Between Fans

LEGO’s new and bold take on passenger airliners is making fans angry…

For the love of aviation, it’s just an airplane! Right? Apparently not. Turns out, when it comes to airplanes, fans can get really particular about what flies and what doesn’t — pun intended. LEGO’s latest City Passenger Airplane apparently doesn’t, and serves as a great example of just how much fans really care about the details when it comes to their hobbies.

A regular LEGO City airplane is probably just about the last thing you’d expect to see fans getting up in arms about. Yet, set #60367 has quickly become quite a controversial one in mere weeks since its launch in late summer 2023, but let me focus on the set itself first, and then the controversy.

Just another LEGO City set?

In many ways, yes. I rarely buy LEGO City sets these days. There is nothing particularly wrong with them, but the target audience is definitely leaning more towards kids than adults. That’s fantastic though, as LEGO is a toy, whether us AFOLs like admitting that or not. And the LEGO Passenger Airplane set targets exactly that — kids over the age of 7.

City sets tend not to be the best of value for money, and that’s certainly true for this one as well. 913 pieces for 100 euros, while not too bad, it’s certainly not going to make parents jump for joy when they’ll see it in the letter to Santa.

As an AFOL, however, the price does make a little more sense. This set comes with a fair number of pretty large pieces. The wings, for instance, are a giant piece incorporating even parts of the fuselage. Can’t say I am overly happy with that, as the bigger the pieces the less reusable it is, but it is a 7+ set, so it makes a little sense that the wings are not brick-built. The nose and tail section also come with fairly large pieces as well, and the windscreen piece is dual-moulded into the fuselage’s nose piece. Impressive dual-moulding, but not my favourite feature of the set.

The main feature, the plane, is really the main reason I got the set. Being a huge airplane fan, even if this is a far cry from say the NASA Space Shuttle or the Concorde, it being a plane set, intrigued me. It’s not a complicated build, yet manages to achieve some details that I certainly didn’t expect to see in a 7+ set. A nice control console for the pilot and the first officer, a front door that opens in a very realistic way, a working cargo hold, first and second-class seats for passengers, a toilet, and a food cart are all little details that make the interior and the entire plane really fun to build and play with.

Certain design features of the airplane — like the low-hanging jet engines — remind me of the 737-Max, which, while doesn’t instil a lot of confidence, we at least know this will never carry real passengers. The curved ends of the wings are something you see more often than not on most modern airliners, and in this case, it’s achieved through using Technic panels. It does feel and look a bit “bolted on”, but then again, considering the target-audience, I’d say it’s good enough.

What perhaps set this airplane apart from all the other passenger airplanes of the LEGO past is the V-tail. LEGO got adventurous here, and while building it is just as straightforward as the rest of the plane, this feature is what got many fans up in arms. More on that later.

My second-favourite build in this set is the apron bus. If you have ever travelled by air, you likely had the not so fortunate “opportunity” to have to be “shuttled” from the gate to the actual plane. For me, this has been less and less the case — thank God — but it’s still a very common practice, especially when it comes to budget airlines.

The LEGO representation of this is a fun little build, though. Nothing unexpected in terms of build techniques. Design-wise, however, it is unexpectedly futuristic and modern with wing doors opening upwards. It also appears to be a self-driving vehicle. I guess airports are a good place to test some of this technology out.

The pushback tug while not my favourite in terms of overall looks, it’s a surprisingly complex build for something so simple. In many ways, it reminds me of Speed Champions cars. A dense build with clever SNOT techniques, and it very nicely fits a minifigure ground-crew driver. The attachment point is as simple as it can get, using nothing more than a blue technic pin that’s permanently attached to the front landing gear of the plane, which — just like the rear landing gears — isn’t retractable.

The baggage truck and catering truck are actually more like one single truck with an extra trailer attached, so I’d argue that LEGO is being a little disingenuous in their marketing. That’s not to say it’s not a satisfying build. While pretty small — 4 stud wide — it gets the job done, and it’s evocative of the 90s vehicle sets. Both trailers — the baggage and the catering — can be pulled at the same time once connected via the ball-joint mechanism. The catering trailer can lift the entire payload to the catering door on the right side of the airplane.

And finally the stairs. Well, they’re certainly nothing to write home about. Simple, effective and thank God, they match the height of the aircraft’s door. What is clever, though, about it, is that it can be hooked up to the little truck that normally carries the baggage or the catering trailers. A nice extra play feature.

A bit about the controversy

Now, I did promise to get back to the V-tail, as that’s what stirred all the controversy around this set. There seem to be two equally vocal camps of LEGO and airplane fans.

• The pro-V-tail fans and the ones who couldn’t care less. Some of them are arguing that the plane looks cool, and perhaps even futuristic. It doesn’t have to follow real-world standards, and V-tails are technically valid even for a passenger airplane. Others just don’t care because it’s a toy and toys don’t necessarily have to match reality.
• The anti-V-tail fans. They’re vehemently opposed to seeing a passenger airliner with an empennage that’s usually reserved for smaller airplanes or fighter jets.

I’m certainly not in the anti-V-tail camp, but I am only partially supporting the pro camp. My reasons are a bit more nuanced. I can understand that LEGO, as a toy company, had to come up with a new design for a LEGO passenger airplane, and it has every right to mix and match design elements, as long as the general outcome looks good. In this case, I am not entirely convinced about the use of the V-tail design. The classic T-tail would have worked potentially better, but I speak as a huge aeronautics fan.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Kids won’t care about airplane design details such as V-tails vs. T-tails, and this set is for kids, after all.

Worth the money at the end of the day?

While I would not class this as one of the best sets — not even in the LEGO City theme — of 2023, as I built it and finally got to play with it, I found myself appreciating it more. Allowing myself to get transported back into my 7-year-old childhood, I would have gone crazy for this set, and I would have spent endless hours playing with the entire setup and the 9 minifigs, none of which are exclusive, but great fun nevertheless.

But even as a parent or grandparent, you will find value in this set. Given that it comes with four separate instruction manuals, this means siblings of the appropriate ages can all build together. Granted, out of the total of 6 bags, bags 4, 5, and 6 are all the main build — the airplane, but even so, younger siblings can take on the challenge of building the pushback tug, the catering truck and the apron bus, each a bag’s worth of pieces.

All in all, not a bad deal after all, and a perfect play set for any kid who loves planes.

Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, LEGO fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer! Read my Hello story here! Subscribe for more stories about LEGO, tech, coding and accessibility! For my less regular readers, I also write about random bits and writing.