Stress testing a De Havilland Mosquito wing in Australia 1945

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Fascinating, thanks for posting

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Interesting document. I am puzzled about what is going on here, MM141 was a Hatfield built aircraft that was written off in a landing accident in the UK at RAF Warboys on 30 Sept 1944, it ran into a ditch, so the undamaged wing may have been salvaged and used for destructive testing. https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/wiki.php?id=155251
Australian production was delayed around the middle of 1944 following wing failure of an Oz built aircraft A52-12, and the first 50 wings produced needed modification, therefore it seems logical that any investigation into that failure would have used an Oz built wing. .
Or is it that data from tests, done in the UK on the MM141 wing were being used as a comparison for duplicate tests done on an Oz built wing for way of a comparison.

Richard

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Thanks James R and I will check the document on Monday and see if there is anything that points to where this wing came from pogno.
DADE

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This is unrelated to the Mosquito with registration MM141. It relates to the wing with production component serial number MM141. As the report says, it is Mk.40 Wing s/n... MM stands for Mosquito Mainplane. There was a thread some time back that discussed all of this sort of thing.
https://forum.keypublishing.com/showthread.php?125641-Mosquito-dataplate-amp-constructor-numbers
You need to read beyond the first few posts to get to the point where the conversation starts ironing out the misunderstandings.

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Two important factors behind the testing in Australia:

  1. Production being local, validation of the build was essential. Amongst other things, some different spec materials were used to the original design - coachwood ply (if I remember correctly) was used in lieu of V3.
  2. There were build problems with the wings where gaps in the build up of the spars were excessive. It is essential when gluing structural joints that gaps are controlled within certain close limits. This was not recognised at first and one aircraft crashed due to wing failure.
There were a couple of Mosquitos that crashed into Sydney suburbs early in the programme. I don't remember the cause of the other crash. In one case some of the debris came down in a primary school just a short walk from where I live now.

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Thank you Nicko for answering that, very interesting. I find the subcontract building of Mosquito's in Oz and Canada fascinating, the short time scales in which it was done was simply amazing.

Richard

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I have just returned home and have taken pictures of the relevant pages from the documents that you are talking about nicko and pogno.
https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7855/47007292882_7ef1ac4fcd_c.jpg

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There was 21 pages of information, but these are the pages that are related to the question and answers brought up in this thread.

DADE