I HAVE BEEN WORKING ON AEROPLANES FOR AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER, but resurrecting vintage combat aircraft is the most challenging and rewarding specialisation I’ve encountered. I started focusing on warbirds when someone asked me to help them rebuild a Hawker Sea Fury fighter, and over the ensuing decade, my small New Zealand company AvSpecs took on more projects for local and international clients, including American-built Curtiss P-40 fighters and British Supermarine Spitfires. But the restoration community in New Zealand had always mused about the legendary, nearly extinct de Havilland DH.98 Mosquito, a former RAF WWII plane made almost entirely from wood.
The Mosquito was a unique piece of the United Kingdom’s wartime history. It was a versatile twin-engine workhorse used as a fighter, bomber, reconnaissance plane, trainer, attack aircraft, ship hunter, and radar-equipped night fighter. In February 1944, a squadron of 18 Mosquitos conducted a low-altitude bombing of the Amiens prison in German-occupied France, freeing dozens of prisoners and French Resistance fighters. When a mission required speed and precision, the RAF called on Mosquitos.
A Mossie was fast; a pair of Rolls-Royce Merlin engines drove 12½-foot (3.8 m) propellers that could pull its airframe through the sky at more than 400 mph (644 km/h). With those double V-12s screaming, practically nothing could catch a Mosquito going flat-out. It was an intimidating plane while it was active, and it was an intimidating restoration. Instead of the standard rivet and sheet metal processes common in aircraft resurrection, the Mossie required thousands of hours of working with screws, glue, and a lumberyard’s worth of timber.
My friend Glyn Powell brought the original Mossie restoration project to life almost single-handedly. He spent years gathering Mosquito fragments, manuals, parts,
