Mosquito aircraft

Early glues were materials found in nature and include resins from trees, gums such as gum arabic, pitch and tar, egg, cheese, fish extracts, and flour paste. The introduction of mbber improved the versatility of the glues, but it was not until aircrafts were produced for the World Wars (1 and II) that the demand for strong lightweight adhesives forced the development of special glues. The Mosquito aircraft of World War II was an example of the application of modem resin adhesives. 

Because gluing of wood members was a very common method of fabricating aircraft during this time, there are innumerable examples. One unusual and interesting example, as mentioned above, is the de Havilland Mo.squito of 1940. In many respects the Mosquito was a bridge between the old world of wood aircraft and the increasingly predominant world of aluminum aircraft (Fig. 2). 

The Mosquito was made almost entirely of wood and for that reason was nearly canceled by the British before it was even built wood aircraft were viewed as fragile and slow based on the previous 40 years of aerospace history. Fortunately the designers of the Mosquito were able to overcome this bias and the Mosquito went on to become one of the best-performing fighter/bombers of the war. 

It is clear that European civil aircraft manufacturers adopted adhesive bonding for major structural elements much more rapidly than their American counterparts, but it is difficult to determine exactly why. Certainly a number of contributing factors are obvious. One was a history of success in incorporating adhesively bonded structure in military aircraft such as the Mosquito. Although the Mosquito was the most unusual and extreme example of adhesively bonded structure, other European wartime aircraft contained bonded structure as well. American military craft of the time were almost exclusively riveted aluminum structure. 

De Bruyne himself was undoubtedly no small factor in the spread of adhesive bonding through the European aerospace community. In addition to co-inventing the Redux family of adhesives, he was involved in the conceptual development of the Mosquito and numerous other aircraft and sponsored (and taught) a series of educational sessions on the benefits of structural bonding during the post-war years. 

To help soldiers keep their aircraft, barracks, tents, foxholes, and forest areas clear of malarial mosquitoes, the refrigeration industry and the U.S. Department of Agriculture developed an aerosol gun that sprayed a mixture of DDT, pyrethrum, and Thomas Midgley, Jr. s Freon 12 (Chapter 6). The insect bomb became so popular that it launched the postwar aerosol industry. 

Barnett, Audit of War, p. 147. For the problems with the British aircraft mentioned, see Postan, Hay and Scott, Design and Development pp. 126-32, who point out that the Welkin was not a complete failure (it did not go into service because the threat it was intended to meet, sub-stratosphere bomber attacks, did not materialise), and the Buckingham was similar in performance to its American contemporary, the Douglas Invader, and suffered in comparison with its British contemporary, the Mosquito. Green, Warplanes of the Third Reich, pp. 241—5. 

Many agricultural and public health operations are carried out around the world using aircraft. From controlling mosquitoes in Florida to eradicating mice in Australia, specialised aircraft perform tens of thousands of operations every year. In the United States, some 4100 aircraft are registered for aerial application. It is estimated that approximately 25% of the 125 million hectares harvested in the USA in 1998 were treated with crop protection products using aircraft. In Australia, some 300 aircraft are used to apply about 20% of the local crop protection chemical market to an average of about 10 million hectares annually. 

Aircraft are able to cover large areas of mosquito-infested countryside each night. To reduce nuisance population levels of Ochlerotatus taeniorhynchus and reduce the threat of diseases such as St Louis Encephalitis, Manatee County MCD, for example, regularly treats some 10000-20000 hectares per night using two MD-500 helicopters and a MBB BO105 helicopter. 

Laboratories were built at Fort Detrick where colonies of the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes were fed on a diet of syrup and blood. They laid their eggs on moist paper towels. The eggs would later turn into larvae, and eventually into a new generation of mosquitoes. The Fort Detrick laboratories could produce half a million mosquitoes a month, and by the late fifties a plan had been drawn up for a plant to produce one hundred and thirty million mosquitoes a month. Once the mosquitoes had been infected with yellow fever, the Chemical Corps planned to fire them at an enemy from cluster bombs dropped from aircraft and from the warhead of the Sergeant missile. 

Casein-based glues were well Uked for woodworking, including for aircraft, as late as the de Havilland Mosquito [127]. 

Abstract. This chapter falls, quite logically, into four distinct sections. The first deals with wooden aircraft from the first heavier-than-air machines through to the mid-1940s. Here animal-based adhesives were a natural choice for bonding wood furniture makers had been using them for centuries. This section ends with the success story of the de Havilland Mosquito a wooden airplane held together with a urea-formaldehyde (U/F) glue - one of the first truly synthetic adhesives. 

One of the most famous examples of powered aircraft construction is that of the de Havilland Mosquito which first flew in 1940 and was in service by mid-1941 (Fig. 9). The DH98 Mosquito was developed from the DH91 Albatross of 1932, which was an all-wood airliner and mail plane the Albatross contained structures bonded using casein glues. 

Oddly, the first use of Redux was not in a metal aircraft or to bond Gordon Aerolite components but in the essentially all-wood, long-range versions of the Mosquito the de Havilland DH103 Hornet and Sea Hornet the latter was the version intended for naval carrier use [11,18,19]. 

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