I just love this bird. One of my favourite designs of all times. My mother used to cut plywood parts for these as part of the WWII effort so it became personal thing for me.
Yes lots of balsa wood in them and one of the aircraft types that saved Great Britain in WWII. But I never could work out why their V-12 engines only had 10 (5 each side) exhaust outlets. Where are the other two?
Canadian Historic Aircraft Assoaciation (CH2A) in Windsor, Ontario, Canada has been buiding one of these from scratch. Sorry, don't know the latest status but a couple of years ago when I was there the fuselage and wings looked complete, they had two new Merlin engines in crates. Looked beautiful. BTW, nice picture Todd, thank you.
Super shot of one of the true masterpieces of design and engineering.
For Frank Theriault, De Havilland designed another similar looking fighter, the DH103 Hornet which was based on the Mosquito and using techniques learned from the Mosquito. The story on Wikipedia is worth a read.
In response to Robert Mott, many different types used various versions of the RR Merlin engine, too many to list here, but most noticeably the Spitfire and Hurricane fighters and the 4-engined Lancaster and Halifax. Even the P-51 Mustang was fitted with it when delivered to the RAF and it transformed its performance at high altitude over the lackluster performance of the Allison engine originally fitted to the Mustang. All aircraft that have used the engine are listed in the Wikipedia article about the engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Merlin
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