The de Havilland Mosquito and the impossible quest to fly the Wooden Wonder again

The de Havilland Mosquito — the twin-engine, 400-mph wooden bomber-fighter that outran the Luftwaffe for most of World War II — had effectively disappeared from the world’s skies by the 1980s. Unlike aluminum airframes that survive decades in desert boneyards, wooden aircraft rot, crack, and quietly disintegrate. Bringing one back to airworthy condition became one of aviation’s most ambitious restoration challenges, spanning more than two decades of painstaking craftsmanship and ending in both triumph and tragedy.

Why Did Flying Mosquitos Disappear?

De Havilland built nearly 7,800 Mosquitos during the war, rolling them off production lines in England, Canada, and Australia. Furniture factories and piano makers contributed — anyone who could work wood got pulled into the effort. That was the genius of the design: while other nations scrambled for aluminum, de Havilland used birch plywood, balsa wood, and spruce, all held together with glue.

But wood is unforgiving over time. It rots, absorbs moisture, cracks, and attracts insects. A wooden airframe stored in a damp English barn for fifty years turns to mulch. By the 1980s, a handful of Mosquitos survived in museums, most in rough condition. The sound of twin Rolls-Royce Merlins howling through a wooden airframe at low level was gone from the world.

Who Took On the Restoration?

Two figures drove the effort. Jerry Yagen, a Virginia businessman and warbird collector, founded the Military Aviation Museum in Virginia Beach and was determined to own a flying Mosquito. Glyn Powell, an engineer in Auckland, New Zealand, founded Avspecs Limited in 1988 with the conviction that he could do what no one else had managed in decades.

The aircraft they chose was KA114, a fighter-bomber variant (FB Mark 26) originally built by de Havilland Canada in 1945. It had arrived in New Zealand too late for combat, served briefly with the Royal New Zealand Air Force, then was retired and scattered — fuselage in one collection, wings elsewhere, components spread across the country like a disassembled jigsaw puzzle.

How Do You Rebuild an Aircraft That Can’t Be Sourced?

There is no Mosquito parts catalog. No supply chain exists. Every component too deteriorated to save had to be manufactured from scratch using original de Havilland drawings, original materials, and original techniques.

The Mosquito fuselage was built in two clamshell halves — a sandwich of balsa wood between layers of birch plywood, formed over massive concrete jigs. The halves were glued together over a framework of spruce stringers and bulkheads, then covered in doped fabric and painted. The wing was a single piece spanning the full aircraft width, built as a stressed-skin structure where the plywood skin itself carried flight loads. Get the grain direction wrong by a few degrees, use wood with incorrect moisture content, and the wing won’t hold under the 4-G turns the airframe was designed for.

Powell’s team had to relearn skills that had vanished from aviation. They studied original de Havilland manuals and consulted the few surviving wartime craftsmen. They sourced birch plywood, Ecuadorian balsa, and Sitka spruce, testing every batch for grain quality and moisture content exactly as de Havilland had done. They mixed Aerolite glue — the same formaldehyde-based adhesive used in wartime production — because modern epoxies behave differently with wood.

What About the Engines and Systems?

KA114 required two Packard-built Rolls-Royce Merlin 225 engines, each producing roughly 1,620 horsepower. While a small global community of Merlin specialists rebuilds these engines for warbird operators, finding two that are airworthy, matched, and correctly configured for a Mosquito installation — with proper reduction gears, accessories, and mounts — is a challenge of its own.

The four-blade Hamilton Standard hydromatic propellers, landing gear rated for an aircraft weighing 16,000 pounds empty and nearly 23,000 pounds loaded, every hydraulic line, every electrical connection, and every instrument had to be sourced or fabricated. All of it had to meet modern airworthiness standards while remaining faithful to the original design.

The Resurrection: KA114 Flies Again

The restoration stretched across more than twenty years. Components that took months to build were sometimes scrapped because the wood wasn’t right or a measurement was off by a fraction of an inch. But by 2012, the fuselage was complete, the wings built, and the engines hung.

On September 27, 2012, KA114 took to the sky over Ardmore Airfield in Auckland, New Zealand. Pilot Keith Skilling, who had spent months in a Mosquito simulator and studying wartime handling notes, lifted the aircraft off the runway and climbed out over the New Zealand countryside. For the first time in decades, a Mosquito was flying. The aviation world celebrated what was not merely a restoration but a resurrection.

The Oshkosh Tragedy

On July 26, 2014, during a display at the Oshkosh air show in Wisconsin, KA114 experienced a catastrophic failure during a low-level, high-speed pass. The aircraft crashed, killing pilot Steve Faulkner. The investigation pointed to a separation of the wing-fuselage joint. The exact cause has been debated — some pointed to display flying stresses, others questioned whether wood and glue, however carefully applied, could fully replicate the structural integrity of a factory-built airframe under sustained high-G maneuvering loads.

After more than two decades of work and all the craftsmanship invested, it ended in seconds.

Why the Work Continues

What happened next says everything about the people who do this work: they started again.

Avspecs under Powell’s leadership began work on another Mosquito. The People’s Mosquito project in the United Kingdom set out to return one to British skies. Victoria Air Maintenance in British Columbia launched its own restoration. The loss of KA114 sharpened rather than extinguished the resolve.

The people who restore and fly warbirds understand the risk inherent in operating old designs built for war. They accept it because the alternative is silence — a world where the Mosquito exists only in photographs and museum placards, where no one hears those Merlins in the air again, where a generation of pilots never learns what the Wooden Wonder sounded like when it was alive.

What these restoration teams preserve extends beyond a single aircraft type. They are keeping alive the craft of building aircraft from wood — understanding how a spar carries a load, how a rib is shaped, how plywood grain direction determines whether a wing holds or fails. That knowledge is fading, and every Mosquito restoration is an act of preservation on two levels: the airplane and the skill that built it.

Somewhere right now, parts are being shaped, glue is being mixed, and a craftsman is running a hand along a piece of Sitka spruce, checking that the grain is straight and true — because Geoffrey de Havilland’s engineers insisted on straight grain, and they were right to insist.

Key Takeaways

• De Havilland produced nearly 7,800 Mosquitos during WWII using birch plywood, balsa, and spruce — but wood’s vulnerability to rot and moisture meant almost none survived in airworthy condition.
• Avspecs Limited in New Zealand spent over 20 years rebuilding Mosquito KA114 using original materials, original techniques, and original de Havilland engineering drawings.
• KA114 flew on September 27, 2012 — the first Mosquito in the air in decades — before being lost in a fatal crash at Oshkosh in July 2014.
• Multiple restoration projects continue worldwide, including efforts by Avspecs, the People’s Mosquito project in the UK, and Victoria Air Maintenance in Canada.
• The restorations preserve not just the aircraft but the dying craft of wooden aircraft construction — skills that vanished from mainstream aviation with the shift to aluminum and composites.