Hope the following answers questions about the Mosquito fighter bomber.
The De Havilland Aircraft company produced the wooden airframe and wings on
the Mosquito for several important reasons. The D.H. company, first and
foremost, were well versed on wooden aircraft construction. On the supply
side, to produce and aircraft in wood put no strain on much needed supplies
of sheet aluminum used for building other planes etc. On the production
side, highly skilled carpenters could be recruited from the general wood
working trade of home industry, which avoided the otherwise inevitable
drain of skilled staff from the aircraft industry. This also put the skills
of master carpenters to invaluable use for the war effort.
The mosquito fuselage was pressure molded in a birch plywood sandwich which
was filled with balsa wood. This conception is directly allied to the
composite structures of today with 'honeycomb' fillings. The fuselage was
made in two halves and then glued together (vertically). The wings were
made as a complete single section some 50 feet in length from panels of
laminated spruce which were glued together. The skin panels helped to form
an extremely strong wing, because the large 'glued area' joining the panels
together. The glued joins took the form of matched, machined tapers which
were, in effect, 15:1 scarfing joints and I think this method joined most
panels in the aircraft where possible.
As for armaments you could take your pick depending on service
requirements. In fighter application the 'Mossy' had 4 .303 machine guns
and 4 cannons in the nose section. It could also fire wing mounted rockets
and drop bombs of all shapes and sizes, and torpedoes. The largest bomb it
could carry weighed 4000lbs and was called the 'cookie'.
- The armament that appealed to me most was for anti submarine work. The
Mossy, in this instance, was armed with a single '60mm' repeating cannon
in the nose - the shells of which were about two feet long. It could fire
the shells at the rate of one per second in bursts of 25. Attacks on part
submerged enemy subs often resulted in the conning towers being blasted
completely off, and several subs caught 'sailing' were reported to have
been cut in half. The D.H. engineers were worried, initially, about the
cannon causing airframe failure due to recoil, but after firing 800 rounds
on both wooden and aluminium 'test' airframes the wooden fuselage was well
able to cope but the aluminium one failed!! Pilots found the cannon a
little disconcerting, however, because a full burst from the cannon had the
effect of putting the brakes on and slowing the Mossy down quite
considerably.
I could have made a better job of this anecdote, but I've only got the
lesser of my two books on war planes, - I lent the best one all about
Mossys to someone, and I can't for the life of me remember who it is. - I
think I'm going to check through my library today and see what other books
are missing and get on the phone!
With all this talk of Mossys and Spits etc, there are two things I'm going
to buy myself for Christmas -a Mosquito and a Spitfire model kit.
Paul.
at their ends were extremely strongest
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