All of you pilots will know that the Mosquito Bomber was not an airplane designed to kill mosquitos. I just read a very good article in the August issue of the EAA Sport Aviation magazine on the Mosquito Bomber. I am not only a pilot, but a woodworker and the Mosquito Bomber has been very significant to me. I was disappointed to find that after building almost 8,000 that there are only two certified to fly.
To the surprise of many, I think that the Mosquito Bomber could fly faster than the famous P51 fighter. It was also faster than any of the German airplanes. That may account for the very low loss rate during the war, but it is not my special interest. It is the fact that the Mosquito Bomber was made mostly from wood. That's right, wood. It also marked the transition from animal and milk protein glues to modern resorcinol glue. Thru out history, man has searched for the perfect glue. Another interesting point was that many of the gluing jigs were made of concrete so that the thin layers of wood would be formed into shape and held while the glue cured. To the surprise of many, in many applications wood can be stronger than aluminum or steel. Wood is one of the few materials that is not affected by fatigue. Most of the plane parked in the bone yard down in the southern desert suffer from fatigue. This would not have happened if those planes were made of wood.
After all this build up about the Mosquito Bomber, I had a chance to speak with a couple of retired Air Force Colonels and was surprised that neither had ever heard of the Mosquito Bomber. I don't know what this says about these two Colonels or the state of our Air Force officers, but it can't be good. When I asked my non Air Force friends who knew something about airplanes, they all knew all about the famous Mosquito Bomber. The USA as well as Canada have been leaders in aviation and share much of its history. Given that tradition and the tradition of our military you would think that they would have, at least, studied the more significant events related too flight.
A side note. When I visited the Smithsonian several years ago, they had the Howard Hughes plane their that he used to set the speed record for flying across the USA. It had part of a wing panel open so that you could see that it had wooden spars. When Hughes was interviewed about the use of wood for the spars, he said that at these high speeds, he did not trust the complex metal spar. He knew that if the wood spar could pass his simple ground test that he could trust his life to it. You all know about the Spruce Goose. It is now on display in a private museum in Oregon.
