The AOPA Pilot blot recently mentioned the Fighter Factory in Virginia will adding a flying restored de Havilland Mosquito KA114 bomber to its collection that was built with recovered parts and new tooling by Avspecs, Limited, at the Ardmore Airfield in Auckland, New Zealand. Avspecs happens to be owned by a husband and wife team who also made sure they did a photo and video shoot of the whole restoration process with the photos and videos posted on MosquitoRestoration.com.
In case you aren’t familiar with the history of the British conceived Mosquito, it first flew on the November 25, 1940 and soon outperformed all other Allied and Enemy aircraft. In fact, it was 23 MPH faster than the Spitfire and so versatile that it performed in every role (e.g. bomber, fighter, fighter bomber, night fighter, photo reconnaissance etc). However and due to their wooden construction, only a few of the 7,000 or so Mosquitos built have managed to survive.
So as you can imagine, restoring a Mosquito to airworthy status from parts sourced and recovered from all over the world was no easy feat as the following short video shows:
Nevertheless, here is a video showing the end result – a Mosquito being flown for the first time in at least 15 years:
Finally, the MRC Aviation blog in New Zealand has found and posted this video of what appears to be the same Mosquito being dismantled in preparation to be shipped to the States:
