swampyankee
Chief Master Sergeant
- 3,986
- Jun 25, 2013
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Of course it was several years later than the P-38.
It also suffered from being overweight, delayed development and was designed around an engine that never made it to flight status (or even test bench?)
The intended "buy" changed quantity several times and finally resulted in just the two prototypes.
Was any US company building any wooden aircraft except for general aviation use in the 1930s?
Some wooden planes, apparently of good design, were complete failures when properly tested
and some, good at the time of their appearance in the skies, were outdated when the war progressed
The Mosquito didn't really have a great radiator setup. It wasn't bad but it wasn't in the same class as a P-51.
.I'm afraid that is selling the Mosquito's radiator short. The system was copied on both sngle- and two-engined A/C (so was late Mustangs), and we can recall that Mustang's radiator was evolving significantly with any major type change. Radiator similar to Mosquitos was proposed by NACA as a drag-reducing feature for P-38.
The Mosquito probably had a better surface finish and quite possibly a better radiator installation than the P-38 but was a much larger aircraft in size. As already mentioned the P-38 was built to withstand a higher load factor.
Catching up to this late in the game. I've ranted about wood in the past. As a maintainer wood sucks, I hate inspecting and repairing it. Although there were many great aircraft made of wood, what you basically build is a "throw-away airplane." There are tons of discussions about this through out this forum.
As far as a wood P-38? Not going to happen. The area where the tail plane was connected to the booms were difficult to manufacture with aluminum, I could imagine trying to build the same structure out of wood.
I would suggest that rather than a wooden plane you could think of the mosquito as a composite construction. It wouldn't have been possible to build without the glues and resins that had been developed.
Think of carbon fibre, that is layers of the fibre in a resin that bonds it together. That's what's different about the mosquito construction, it's not just blocks of wood screwed together.
Totally wrong! I work with carbon fiber and it doesn't rot in humidity. Although time consuming, carbon fiber is a lot easier to make repairs on, where wood structures are limited in size and the amount of repairs that could be made on a given area.