[brando]

Originally Posted by Xiola

It has often been suggested that a huge fleet of Mosquitos would have been a far better proposition than the hundreds of Lancasters bombing every night, but thats another debate.

My late father-in-law was one of the relatively small number of people employed building Mosquito airframes in small factories across the South of England. Discharged on medical grounds after Dunkirk he was put onto war-work and remained in the aircraft industry until 1946. He was a fully-qualified carpenter/joiner with experience in working with sheet-ply and adhesives.

This is a clue to why a "huge fleet" would have been so difficult to produce. The great strength and lightness of the Mossie came about because the airframe was built primarily of wood, mostly sheets of ply steamed and curved over formers. This was then overlaid by further sheets laid diagonal to those preceding, bonded with a strong artificial adhesive. This method afforded remarkable rigidity and durability, but it required the employment of skilled wood-workers to craft them. The length of training required to equip a worker with these skills was far greater than that required to create a semi-skilled worker in the metal aircraft industry.

B