De Havilland Mosquito

Mosquito Pathfinders by Philip West

Military Gallery:

Groundcrew busy themselves readying their de Havilland Mosquito as the aircrew head out towards the aeroplane for yet another mission to a high value target over occupied Europe during WW2. Their dangerous job as Pathfinders is to accurately mark and bomb the target for the main heavy bomber force. It required great skill in navigation, airmanship and courage. The Mosquito proved to be a real thoroughbred and ideal for many varied combat sorties so earning the nick-name The Wooden Wonder. 

De Havilland Mosquito | In-Flight & Walk Around | Planes of Fame
Planes of Fame

Mosquitos

Mosquito Pathfinders by Philip West

Started working on a jigsaw puzzle made from this painting last night. This morning this shows up:

De Havilland Mosquito (N474PZ)

De Havilland Mosquito

PZ474 is one of the last few airworthy examples of this aircraft.

High Altitude Mosquito

De Havilland Mosquito: The wooden fighter-bomber that could do it all
Imperial War Museums
I'm reading Night Soldiers by Alan Furst, a WW2 espionage novel. In part 4, our hero, the Russian trained Bulgarian spy Khristo is now working for the allies. He has been parachuted into 'Czechoslovakia' and is skulking around Prague doing basic spy stuff, collecting information and radioing it up to a Mosquito flying in orbit around the city in the middle of the night at 35,000 feet. 35,000 feet? Really? Then the above video pops up on YouTube and yes, they did fly at 35,000 feet. But how did the pilots survive, not all of the Mosquitos were pressurized? Which brings us to the second video.


High Altitude Flight during WWII
390th Memorial Museum Foundation

Seems oxygen was one of the lessor problems of high altitude flight. The cold was the biggest problem.

Mosquito

1945 de Havilland Mosquito

The Bombardment

The Bombardment / The Shadow In My Eye - Netflix Movie Trailer
What's on Netflix

We're looking over the selection on Netflix this evening and I notice the blurb on this one and I say, hey! I know that story! I mentioned it in a post about the De Havilland Mosquito. All I noticed at the time was that the Brits had made a successful attack on Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen in the last year of WW2. I didn't pay any attention to the 125 civilians killed when some of the attacking aircraft mistook a school for their target.

This movie is mostly about the people on the ground in Copenhagen and mostly about the people at the school. We got a lot of ordinary life, but there is also a handful of crazy and solid helping of horror. The story is told almost entirely with pictures. There are some bits of dialog, but I think it's just there to let you know that these are ordinary people who can speak. It's really quite an amazing film.

Update September 2022 replaced missing video.

Charge

Arctic Cat Snowmobile

A couple of weeks ago there was a story in the WSJ about snowmobiles that mentioned some of technical advances that have been made, and one of them was turbochargers. Turbochargers have been around for a while, you can buy a production car right off the showroom floor that is equipped with a turbocharger or even two. Hot rodders have been putting them on all kinds of machines, but as far as I know no one has put a turbocharger on a small, mass production engine, like those found in motorcycles or snowmobiles, until now.

P-38 Turbocharger Installation

Anyway this started me musing on the subject and the turbochargers from the WW2 P-38 fighter aircraft popped into my head, so I went digging, and some strange stuff surfaced.

First of all, almost all WW2 aircraft engines were supercharged, which gave them enough boost that they were able to reach altitudes of 25,000 feet (five miles high). When engines were equipped with turbochargers, the turbochargers were added to the existing supercharger arrangement so the engine now had two stage supercharging. The turbo provided the first stage. This moderately compressed air was fed to the supercharger, which compressed it to the point that is was as dense as the air you find at sea level, and fed it to the engine. This two stage compression gave the aircraft enough power to reach 40,000 feet (eight miles high), more or less.

Shane Christopherson and his General Electric turbocharger

The General Electric turbocharger (it is always referred to as the General Electric turbocharger) was a bit of a beast. It was also secret, kind of like the Norden bombsight or RADAR. Early on in the war, we sent some P-38's to Britain, but for some reason (perhaps because we didn't trust the Brits to be able to keep a secret), they weren't equipped with General Electric turbochargers, which had a sizable impact on their performance. I imagine the Brits weren't too happy about this, but beggars can't be choosers, so they took them anyway.

P-47 engine, turbocharger and associated duct work

The P-47 was also equipped with a General Electric turbocharger. The P-47 always looked a little plump, but I figured the designers knew what they were doing, and who knows what kind of complicated stuff was buried in the fuselage. Well, now I know. It was puffed up to accommodate all the duct work needed to connect the engine in the nose with the turbocharger and intercooler in the tail.


The De Havilland Mosquito
Now I'm watching a YouTube video about the De Haviland Mosquito which seems to have been quite an aircraft. It is a British aircraft, so it was not equipped with a General Electric turbocharger, but it still managed to get to high altitudes. How did it do that without a turbocharger? It had a two-stage supercharger, that's how.

Merlin Two-Stage Supercharger

The two-stage superchargers on the Merlin engine were driven by gears. General Electric turbochargers are driven by exhaust gas from the engine. Gears are dense and compact. The duct work needed to connect the engine to the turbo is bulky, but not dense. The weight penalty is probably similar. Duct work is easy to fabricate out of sheet metal. Gears require machine tools and castings to hold them alignment, which means the drive mechanism for a supercharger is going to be more expensive than the duct work for the turbo. On the other hand, the turbo needs to be made from unobtanium in order to withstand the heat from the exhaust gas. Superchargers can be made from regular old metal like aluminum or even iron, if you don't mind the extra mass. I think it is safe to say that the General Electric turbocharger was the forerunner of the General Electric jet engine program.

Bombing of the Gestapo headquarters in the Shellhus, Copenhagen, Denmark in March 1945. A Mosquito pulling away from its bombing run is visible on the extreme left, centre.

de Haviland Mosquito was an all wood airplane, and it you believe everything in the video, you might conclude that it was vastly superior to all of the big, heavy, four-engined bombers (like the Flying Fortress, the Liberator and the Lancaster) that the Allies used for the majority of their bombing raids on Europe. That superior performance was entirely the result of its high speed (fastest WW2 military aircraft), which it was able to attain because of its light weight. It was light because it didn't carry any armor, or gunners or gun turrets. Originally it did not have any guns at all, but once they found out what it could do, they mounted a bunch of guns in the nose.


Twelve O'Clock High
I suppose it was 12 O'Clock High, and my dad's role as a gunner in a B-24, that locked the heavy bomber into the leading role (in my mind) in our war against the Axis. I remember quite vividly how the Japan's Mitsubishi Zero was a light weight, high-performance aircraft whose Achilles' heel was its lack of armor. What all this illustrates is the 'design by committee' syndrome. When the enemy builds a high performance aircraft without any armor, it's because they are not concerned about their pilot's well being, but when we do it and the aircraft is hugely successful, we shove it under the rug because it doesn't fit the narrative that the military industrial complex is trying to sell us.

There are advantages to this approach. The story is vital in order to garner popular support, which you really need in order to win. And building big, heavy airplanes means you need a big, heavy, industrial machine to produce them. And if push comes to shove, you can drop a lot of weight by getting rid of the armor, which is going to make your aircraft perform better, which is what you really need in combat. It's kind of like sandbagging. You carry a bunch of extra weight around with you which makes you look slow and cumbersome, but it makes you stronger, and when it comes to crunch time, you can drop those sandbags and really drop the hammer on your enemies.

WW2 British Aircraft

Walrus Flying Boat
Click me to go to the album

I'm still mucking about with pictures, trying to find some way to organize them, trying to figure which is the best tool for the job, which web site I like the best. Picasa is a little trying, but it does seem to do most of what I want. Like I said earlier, Stu sent me a link to a page full of pictures. I really don't like these kind of things, you constantly have to fiddle with the controls to get the next picture on the screen. I like slide shows. Press the go button, and then click once every time you want to see the next picture. No fuss, no muss. Well, mostly. Still haven't it gotten it completely sorted out, but it's still better having to scroll through one long page of pictures.

I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out how to organize this bunch, and I finally came up with a sequential order that makes a sort of sense.

Biplanes on the water
Walrus Flying Boat
  Swordfish on floats
Biplanes on aircraft carriers
  Swordfish over the Ark Royal
Swordfish on carrier deck
  Swordfish on grass
Fairey Albacore landing on carrier
Mono-planes on aircraft carriers
  Fairey Fulmar
Royal Navy Corsairs on hanger deck
  Royal Navy Corsairs on flight deck
Seafire & Pilot
Land based monoplanes. We start with a couple of American planes.
  Mustang, or so the label says, hard to tell just what it is, but the angle of the shot is cool.
  P-40 Warhawk in North Africa with a crewman directing the pilot from the wing tip.
    Oh, the Glorius Spitfire!
    Crew tinkering with a Spitfire on the tarmac
  Pilots talking while crew tinkers
  Crew tinkering with a Spitfire on the grass
  Crew tinkering with a Spitfire up on stands
  Spitfire being painted in D-Day stripes
  Spitfires on the flight line ready to go. I don't think they ever looked this good during the war.
  Loading a camera into a Spit for photographic reconnaisance
  Ready to go
  Really ready to go
  Photo reconn taking off
  Airborne
  Battle of Britain
  Squadron formation
  Landing craft on the beach in Italy, dead Spitfire in the water
Typhoon
  Arming
  Small formation in flight
Gliders
  100 Gliders on the ground in Operation Market Garden
  Hamilcar Glider
Twin Engine Bombers
  Baltimore nose
  Baltimore dropping a bomb
  Beaufort front end
  Group of Blenheims and Hurricanes over North Africa
  Blenheim on the ground
  Pair of Hampdens in flight
  Crew going aboard a Douglas A-20 Havoc
  Hudson on the tarmac
  B-25 Mitchell being serviced
    My favorite, the Mosquito
  5 Mosquitos on the grass
  Mosquito gun test
  Crew going aboard a Mosquito
  Mosquito in flight
Four Engine Bombers
  Halifax in flight
  A whole bunch of Sterlings on the tarmac, pre-D-day
  3 Sterlings in flight
  At least 5 Wellingtons on the ground
  Servicing a Whitley
    Oh, the Glorious Lancaster
  Nose turret
  Tail turret
  Big wigs walking under the nose
  Big crowd standing around
    Lancaster / Armament
  Bombs en train to loading
  All loaded
Armament
  Bomb menu
  Mucking with fuses in North Africa
  Preparing rockets
  Ammo belt assembly
Pilots
    Bomber crews
  Bomber crew
  Two stories
  Looking forward
    Fighter
  Pilot
  Brit pilot and mascot, North Africa
  Hurricane cockpit check in snow
  Earl Stanley Lock & Friend, Ace
  RAF Pilot
  Hurricane pilot Ginger Lacey, scored 18 kills in Battle of Britain
Hurricane pilots
  Hurricane pilots hanging out by their caravan
  RAF Trainees in Mesa Arizona
Home front
  Plotting room
  Making terrain models for RAF, UK 1943
  Assembling landing gear in the factory
  Short Sunderland flying boat factory
  RAF Brass
  Moral Boosting Poster
  Lancaster on display at War Rally, Trafalgar Square, London
  Wellington recovered from Loch Ness

Update March 2019. Picasa has died, but it appears that all of the my pictures have been moved to Google Drive, so the link under the picture at top should take you to the album.
Update May 2019. Fixed.

Mosquito Takes To The Air

Newly restored British WWII Wooden Fighter-Bomber takes to the air in New Zealand. Bunch of photos here.

Another Mosquito reference.

Via Earth-Bound Misfit.

Splinter

Joe Harmon's Wooden Supercar

Oookay, Joe, you're going to be alright, just sit down and take a deep breath. Everything is going to be alright.

Fortunately no one offered Joe this bit of advice when he started on this project, or if they did he ignored them.

"We aren't really all about mission statements around here; too often, they are phony and superfluous. That said, here is ours. We are building a high-performance, mid-engined super car from wood composites as a graduate project at North Carolina State University. Wood will be used where ever possible, including the chassis, body, and large percentages of the suspension components and wheels. The car has a target weight of 2500lbs and a power goal of over 600 horsepower. We aren't trying to sell anything; we aren't trying to save the world, and we aren't advocating that everyone should drive a wooden car. This project is a scholastic endeavor in which we are simply trying to explore materials, learn, teach, share ideas, and stimulate creativity."

H/T to Marc. Go to Joe's website for some stunning color pictures, or visit his blog for his progress reports. This B&W picture has the Splinter in the foreground and a de Havilland Mosquito, a British WW2 era aircraft made of wood, in the background. I put up a post about another WWII era British aircraft made at least partly of wood on Pergelator Lite.

Update July 2016. Replaced missing picture and revised last paragraph.