Mossie speed

[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

[Al Schlageter]

Brando, the Mossie's skin was a sandwich of 2 layers of plywood with balsa between.

Nice link to Mossie construction in Downsview Ontario Canada
http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/pm.php?i...sh&ex=00000192

Notice the number of women involved in the construction of the Mossie.

[KG26_Alpha]

Hi B

Here's a link to some Mossie construction at 5 mins in.

Use the link at the top of the youtube screen streaming disabled I think !!!

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ9EJ3b_k1E

See you in the air over the weekend hopefully.

[Xiola]

Thanks for that link Alpha!

[Blackdog_kt]

I read the same thing about the Mossie/Lancaster debate in a quarterly aviation magazine. The thing to consider here is that a Mossie could carry almost as heavy of of a load as a B17 and the Lancaster carried even more

I think the text in the magazine was "the Mosquito was a precision weapon, like a sword, while the Lancaster was a crude area effect weapon like a bludgeon"

It's an interesting debate but i tend to agree that if enough Mossies could be built they would be a far better alternative to the thousands of 4 engined RAF heavies. They had as much of a carrying capacity as the american daylight bombers, better accuracy in their drops (especially if you add some Oboe equipped Mossie pathfinders in the mix, while 4 engined heavies dropped their bomb loads over empty countryside for much of the early stage of the night bombing campaign due to navigation difficulties), lower chance of interception by the enemy and probably better crew survivability rates in the event of a crash, which the Lancaster was notorious for.

[Al Schlageter]

It's an interesting debate but i tend to agree that if enough Mossies could be built they would be a far better alternative to the thousands of 4 engined RAF heavies.

No, it would be better than the 1000s of American heavies. Try to imagine the same number, or more, escorted Mossies fanning out over occupied Europe, cruising at half the speed again as the American heavies. The Germans were hard pressed with the American heavies so think how hard pressed they would be with Mossies.

[Igo kyu]

Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt

It's an interesting debate but i tend to agree that if enough Mossies could be built they would be a far better alternative to the thousands of 4 engined RAF heavies.

The mosquito had a far lower bomb capacity than the (British) 4 engined heavies. Grand Slam dropped from a Mossie? not possible, Tall Boy? not possible.

Without guided munitions, all high altitude bombing is going to be somewhat inaccurate, and nighttime makes that much worse.

[Blackdog_kt]

Yep, you're right, but it's no use having a 8 ton bomb load when

a) you can't ensure a sufficient number of bombers reaching the target due to survivability issues
b) half of the time these bombs are dropped on empty countryside and
c) you lose a few hundred of hard to train aircrew each night, while the Mossie only has a crew of 2-3

Of course, during the late stages of the war that accuracy improved and air superiority was in allied hands we could argue that RAF night heavies could at last do a proper job so we can't really discount them totally. The reason is simple, you can't develop new heavy bombers in the span of 1-2 years during wartime.

So, while it might have been more effective to use Mossies until advances in navigation, accuracy and survivability were made for the heavies, we could also say that if no 4 engined heavies were around for the early part of the war then there would be no reason to improve and refine them or the tactics they used, so in the end there probably would be no heavies at all. Interesting conundrum this one