De Havilland Mosquito: The wooden fighter-bomber that could do it all

Just imagine a flight of mossies with a squadron of p-38s flying high cover.

RED -Sweden -etc Diplomatic Courieras??? SOE?flt crew / Ball bearings -illucidate please??

Amazing! Brilliant!

As a cabinet maker, my grandad worked for 'Old man Lebus' (as he called his employer) in Tottenham, making fuselage's for Mosquitoes during the war. He always spoke about the Mozzie with huge pride.

The de Havilland first flight memorial is a short, often muddy walk just off the A34 between Winchester and Newbury - a small stone slab in a field that you'd miss unless you knew it was there but a huge significance to what was to follow.

Really pleased this video came up in my algorithm; an interesting, enjoyable and very well presented watch.

My late father was a target tower operator on the very Mosquito that is feature in this video. The Mosquito has been restored at Duxford Air museum Cambridgeshire.

build in Hatfield Hertfordshire uk ... beautiful

My fav model ever was G for George Lancaster, the mossie was 2nd, all Merlin powered, beautiful and deadly if you had the wrong end of the stick, great vid

How many preserved ?

My Mother built these aircraft at the General Motors plant in Oshawa Ontario Canada during WWII

Imagine if they had put rolls Royce griffon engines in them 😱

As much as everybody loves spits without doubt the mosquito was the hero as some pilot said it was like getting out of an Austin seven into a Ferrari , what a cracking aeroplane ,awesome…

still......over a thousand gone lost above or in germany

Eer browning " brittish"?😅

I'm, if you investigate you will find that Esa, of stevenage who made your sliding/folding hanger doors[ check the roller castings on the post rollers also we're involved tith the mosquito manufacture😂

The Luftwaffe was more concerned with the Mosquito than any other allied type.

Fantastic all-around aircraft!

1 round every other second?! Slow!

MOS-SKEE-TOE

I live in High Wycombe, where many of the wooden furniture factories were turned over to making Mosquitoes - yet there isn't a single memorial in the town to celebrate this wonderful aeroplane. Need to alert the mayor...

Totally agree, much better a plain colour.

Such a legendary bomber

Great suburb to say the least

Hey... Is it not the most beauty kid in the war (WWII) or maybe I may be mistaken 😂

Sometimes I like to imagine an alternate universe Where people who talk about historical vehicles and the people who talk about nature were swapped so it be like




“A wild Spitfire has found a herd of BF-109’s and HE-119’s, it uses its weapons to destroy some aircraft for its meal. However, it is quickly outnumbered and has to run away.”

“A normal Honey Bee is armed with a machine stinger chambered in 7.62x10mm rounds. It has about 3000hp and the pilots use them in kamikaze missions back in the day”

Great plane 😍❤️

Researching my great uncle on remembrance day 2024, and discovered he was a pilot flying a de Havilland Mosquito. Fascinating to find out more about his plane. Unfortunately he and his crewman were killed in a crash on return from a raid on Schotts Glassworks in Jena, Germany on 27th May 1943. RIP Flight Lieutenant Willdon Simpson Drysdale Sutherland and George Ernest Dean

this wood technology came from poland aircraft industry

It was called, and actually was - a Wooden Wonder.

Beautiful Aircraft👌

"The worst part about the mosquito was that the Airforce never had enough of them"
-some wise WW2 vet

Troll pilots, it made Germans rage quit

My uncle, Tom Harvey, flew Mosquitoes for reconnaissance, intelligence photography and, I suppose, aerial bombing. He must have been one of the very youngest pilots. When WW2 'ended', he flew privately and 'unofficially' for a mysterious US employer who was very interested in getting aerial evidence of what was going on and /or being constructed in the Far East by 'Foreign Powers'. He left behind a massive collection of aerial photography from that era.

Becker Mount

Some decades ago while working on Haida Gwaii (formerly Queen Charlotte Islands off the NW BC coast) I discovered a lake near where I used to launch my sea kayak. It was 'Mosquito Lake'. Given that I never saw a single mosquito there I asked around.
It turns out this was a location where Sitka Spruce were harvested build the 1100 or so which were built at a piano plant in eastern Canada.

Like almost all DH aircraft, the Mosquito is beautiful and functional for its purpose. The Comet is the ultimate incarnationtion of this.

Ooh, a (or possibly the) TSR2 behind the presenter ❤

Such a beautiful plane.

Typically, the ingenuity of one individual exceeds the collective 'intelligence' of the British government who did their best to supress new ideas before and during WW2

Fun fact! My great grandpa designed this war plane!

Superb presentation. First class all round

Alright John fury jr

What an incredible feat of engineering!

I don’t know if anyone repeated the story of a Mosquito strafing Herman Goering off the stage while he was giving giving a speech about the “superior Luftwaffe”. Pretty darn great plane. Amazing since it was plywood!

Very good video. But wasnt the german Junkers Ju 88 the first real multirole-airplane?

I would have loved to see the face of the spitfire pilot who saws the mosquito racing past him in the flight tests.

This is a superbly presented video of this wonderful aircraft. No other wartime aircraft was so potent as the Mosquito. In both bomber and fighter she had no equal. In the second world war which saw so many beautiful aircraft, great aircraft, the dehavilland Mosquito was the greatest of all. As former Navigator Kenneth Oatley says of her; "With drop tanks we could fly for six or seven hours with quite a good range. If we put on speed we were faster than most of their fighters anyway. Being made of wood their radar detection didn't find us so easily. She was the sort of aircraft you could be absolutely confident in and felt she was master of all and nothing could touch her!"

Thanks. Very interesting. Look forward to coming and seeing it. I know a man who was an engineer on these planes in 1945

Brilliant.