KA114, the de Havilland Mosquito, and the Wooden Wonder That Flew Again After Sixteen Years Because One Man in New Zealand Built the Molds From Scratch

The de Havilland Mosquito was a World War II combat aircraft built almost entirely of wood - plywood, balsa, and spruce - that became one of the fastest aircraft in the sky. After the last airworthy Mosquito crashed in 1996, no example flew anywhere on Earth for 16 years. That changed in September 2012, when KA114 took to the air in New Zealand - rebuilt using fuselage molds that one enthusiast, Glyn Powell, had painstakingly recreated from scratch after the wartime originals were destroyed.

What Was the de Havilland Mosquito?

In the late 1930s, conventional wisdom held that a serious combat aircraft had to be built of aluminum and steel, and had to bristle with defensive guns to survive. De Havilland rejected both ideas. They proposed an aircraft made of wood, carrying no defensive armament at all, that would simply outrun anything sent to catch it.

The logic was elegant. Wood didn’t compete for strategic aluminum, which everyone knew would be rationed once war came. It could be worked by furniture makers, piano builders, and cabinet shops - skilled hands that would otherwise never build aircraft. And a properly shaped wooden airframe came out smooth and light, and light meant fast.

When the Mosquito first flew in late 1940, it silenced the skeptics. It was faster than the Spitfire, Britain’s front-line fighter - and it did it as a bomber, carrying a bomb load over distance and returning before enemy fighters could reach it. The troops called it the “Mossie.” History remembers it as the “Wooden Wonder.”

How Was the Mosquito Built?

The Mosquito’s construction is the key to its entire story - and to why it could eventually be rebuilt at all.

The fuselage was molded in two halves, left and right, each laid up in a large concrete mold. The build used a “wood sandwich”: a layer of birch plywood, a thick core of lightweight balsa, and another layer of plywood on the outside. Balsa in the middle kept it feather-light; plywood on the faces made it strong. Bonded together, the shell was extraordinarily stiff for its weight and smooth as a piano.

Each half was fitted out while it lay open like a canoe - control cables, wiring, and pipes all installed by hand while a worker could simply reach in. The two halves were then glued together around the internals to complete the fuselage. The wing was a single one-piece unit of spruce and plywood running straight through, with an engine hung on either side.

Those engines were two Rolls-Royce Merlins - the same power plant that drove the Spitfire and the Mustang. Two of them, running in harmony, produce a sound enthusiasts travel long distances to hear.

What Roles Did the Mosquito Fly?

The Mosquito proved remarkably versatile. It served as a bomber, a radar-equipped night fighter, a photo-reconnaissance aircraft flying too high and fast for German interceptors, and a pathfinder marking targets for heavy bombers. It flew low-level precision raids that are still studied today.

Its effectiveness was so galling to the enemy that Hermann Göring himself complained on the record about it - frustrated that the British could build a superior aircraft out of wood in piano factories while Germany struggled with aluminum. Fast, elegant, and made of the “wrong” material, the Mosquito was better than nearly everything sent against it. More than 7,000 were built.

Why Did Flying Mosquitoes Almost Disappear?

Wood is the reason the Mosquito succeeded - and the reason it nearly vanished. Aluminum airframes can sit in a desert boneyard for decades and largely survive, which is why so many warbirds were recovered from jungles and swamps.

Wood is organic. It absorbs water, swells and shrinks with the seasons, and its glue joints eventually let go. Fungus sets in. Left in a damp climate, a wooden aircraft rots. Of the 7,000-plus built, survivors dwindled fast after the war, and airworthy examples faster still. By the 1990s, only a couple remained flying worldwide.

Then, at an airshow in England in 1996, the last flying Mosquito suffered engine trouble on a low pass and crashed. Both crew members were lost, and the aircraft was destroyed. For the next 16 years, not a single Mosquito flew anywhere on Earth. The surviving examples sat silent in museums as static displays.

How Did KA114 Fly Again?

The obstacle was the molds. You cannot rebuild a Mosquito the way you rivet up new aluminum panels - the airframe is molded, and it requires the large concrete female molds the fuselage halves were laid up in. Those molds had all been destroyed after the war, broken up and bulldozed. No molds meant no fuselage, and no fuselage meant no aircraft.

The breakthrough came from Glyn Powell in New Zealand. Working largely on his own, he set out to solve the fuselage problem - not for profit, but because someone had to. He obtained original de Havilland drawings, studied an original fuselage, and built a plug (a male form in the exact shape of the fuselage), faired and sanded until the curves were precisely right. From that plug, he built the molds. Tooling the wartime British industry had thrown away, one man rebuilt in his own shop over years.

With the molds recreated, a brand-new fuselage could once again be laid up the original way. That set the stage for the aircraft at the center of this story: KA114.

The Story of KA114

KA114 was built in Canada, at the de Havilland plant in Ontario, late in the war. She was a fighter-bomber variant and never saw combat. After the war she was struck off and eventually ended up as a derelict on a farm on the Canadian prairie, sitting in the weather for decades as her wood decayed - a collection of corroded fittings and rotten plywood.

American collector Jerry Yagen, who runs the Military Aviation Museum in Virginia, acquired what remained of her. The remnants of KA114, Glyn Powell’s molds, and the dream of a flying Mosquito all came together at Avspecs, a restoration shop in Auckland, New Zealand specializing in exactly this kind of work.

The team spent years on the project. They reused original metal fittings where the metal was still sound - engine mounts, undercarriage, and hardware - and built a new wooden airframe around them off the reborn molds. It was cabinetmaker’s work executed to aircraft tolerances: fitting out the two fuselage halves while open, running every line by hand, then joining them exactly as in 1943. Two Merlins were hung on the wing, followed by props, instruments, fabric, and paint.

On a spring day at Ardmore, New Zealand, in September 2012, KA114 rolled onto the runway. The pilot ran up the two Merlins, and for the first time since 1996, that Rolls-Royce snarl rolled from a Mosquito. She lifted off - light, clean, and fast, exactly as de Havilland had promised seventy years earlier.

Why This Restoration Matters

KA114 was not a replica or a mock-up. She was a genuine molded plywood-and-balsa de Havilland Mosquito flying under two Merlins - and she wasn’t the end of the line. Because Glyn Powell’s molds existed, other Mosquitoes have since returned to the air.

The deeper achievement is that this restoration recovered more than a machine. It recovered the craft and knowledge of how to build a Mosquito fuselage - a skill that had nearly died with the wartime generation. A young craftsman in Auckland learned to lay up a Mosquito fuselage by hand, a skill lost before he was born, and can now pass it on. That is the real point of restoration: keeping an unbroken chain of knowledge alive.

Key Takeaways

• The de Havilland Mosquito was a WWII combat aircraft built of plywood and balsa, with no defensive guns, that relied on speed - flying faster than the Spitfire on its debut in 1940.
• The fuselage was molded in two halves using a plywood-balsa-plywood “sandwich,” which made the aircraft light and fast but also vulnerable to rot over time.
• After the last airworthy Mosquito crashed in 1996, none flew anywhere in the world for 16 years.
• Glyn Powell of New Zealand rebuilt the destroyed fuselage molds from scratch using original drawings, making new-build fuselages possible again.
• KA114, restored by Avspecs for Jerry Yagen’s Military Aviation Museum, flew at Ardmore in September 2012 - the first flying Mosquito in 16 years, and the aircraft that reopened the type’s return to the skies.