De Havilland Mosquito

[GeorgeC]

Perhaps we should be looking at something that follows the Mosquito 'philosophy' but not the shape.  The DH95 Albatross shows us how DH handled a 4-engine wing.  The Canberra fuselage, especially the front, has always had a 'hint of Mosquito' about it for me, and was actual outcome of the fast, unarmed approach to bomber design.   The Canberra's payload, weights and dims are very similar to the numbers Jon quoted from Buttler.  

A tail dragging Canberra, fitted with a DH95 wing and 4 Merlins, would be an interesting project.

Regards

GeorgeC

[jcf]

Perhaps we should be looking at something that follows the Mosquito 'philosophy' but not the shape.  The DH95 Albatross shows us how DH handled a 4-engine wing.  The Canberra fuselage, especially the front, has always had a 'hint of Mosquito' about it for me, and was actual outcome of the fast, unarmed approach to bomber design.   The Canberra's payload, weights and dims are very similar to the numbers Jon quoted from Buttler. 

A tail dragging Canberra, fitted with a DH95 wing and 4 Merlins, would be an interesting project.

Regards

GeorgeC

Actually the only number I quoted from Buttler was the 46,000lb weight, the others were my estimates using the B. Mk. IV performance as a baseline.

The Albatross was the DH 91, the DH 95 was the all-metal Flamingo...the DH 91 wingshape was the culmination of forms seen in DH designs predating the DH 88 Comet and continuing through the DH 90 biplane. In someways the Albatross is an enlarged monoplane DH 86, which was a very elegant 4-engine biplane. De Havilland's later high performance wing shapes went through a variety of forms starting with the DH 93 Don. As elegant as the DH 91's wings were I personally find it doubtful that it would have been used on the 4-engine Mossie as, unlike the DH 98 Mosquito, the shape and construction did not really lend itself to rapid mass production.

Cheers, Jon

[famvburg]

    How about the 4 engined Mossie being along the same development as the Junkers 488 being derived from the 388? Plugs & stretches being more appropriate than a 1.5X enlargement?  

[Jeffry Fontaine]

Jon, I think you are going in the right direction with your drawing except the cockpit could be recessed even further with minimal interference with the fuselage lines, perhaps similar in appearance to the Republic R-12 Rainbow.  With the larger fuselage, it would be possible to do that and still have enough room for bombadier, pilot, flight engineer, radioman, and navigator. 

Perhaps going one step further and converting it from a tail dragger to a more conventional tricycle landing gear arrangement.  This would be possible with a small rearrangement of the cockpit and crew positions and perhaps placing the wing a little further back to regain the center of gravity for balace purposes. 

If this larger Mosquito was designed for to carry a 16,000 pound bomb load to Berlin, I now wonder if that would include a pair of the 8,000 pound blockbuster weapons or four of the 4,000 pound cookies as a standard load.  Or would the bomb load have been 16 X 1000 pound bombs or equivalent weight in incendiary bombs?  For shorter distance missions would the aircraft have been able to carry the 22,000 pound Grand Slam? 

As a Coastal Command aircraft, I could see this aircraft carrying 8 X 2,000 pound mines for anti-shipping missions.   

[GeorgeC]

I think the 'super Mosquito' and 4 engine projects are being confused.  The twin Sabre-engined project was supposed to carry a 4000lbs bomb load and basically ran out of steam and as the evolution of the Merlin allowed the developed MkXVI to meet pretty much all of the requirements.

Carrying 16 000 lbs in a 46 000 lbs, fast, unarmed bomber looks a bit much; the Lancaster's 'routine' load was up to 14 0000 lbs in a 63 000 lbs aeroplane while the Canberra, with jet engines, fitted 6000 lbs internally on a 46 000 lbs airframe. On the basis that a twin-engined Mosquito could carry 4000 lbs of bombs perhaps a four-engined should carry about 8000lbs - mathematically simple but consistent with the other payload and weight figures.

I would also tend towards a 3-man crew like the Canberra - the tasks and technology the crew would have had to manage would have been reasonably similar.  Weight management would be critical to this aircraft to maintain the height/speed capabilities which would allow it to avoid most night fighter attacks.

Regards

GeorgeC

[Jeffry Fontaine]

Thanks for the reality check, had to take another look at the figures, I would hazard to say that a Mosquito-like design capable of carrying a 16,000 pound payload would border on the size of the B-36 and take a large forest to build and many more engines than would fit on the the wings.   

[GeorgeC]

A 6-engined Mosquito - now we are getting somewhere!

Regards

George

[Jeffry Fontaine]

A 6-engined Mosquito - now we are getting somewhere!

Regards

George

The question is would that buzzing noise be the aircraft or all of the termites chewing away at it?  

[jcf]

I think the 'super Mosquito' and 4 engine projects are being confused.  The twin Sabre-engined project was supposed to carry a 4000lbs bomb load and basically ran out of steam and as the evolution of the Merlin allowed the developed MkXVI to meet pretty much all of the requirements.

Carrying 16 000 lbs in a 46 000 lbs, fast, unarmed bomber looks a bit much; the Lancaster's 'routine' load was up to 14 0000 lbs in a 63 000 lbs aeroplane while the Canberra, with jet engines, fitted 6000 lbs internally on a 46 000 lbs airframe. On the basis that a twin-engined Mosquito could carry 4000 lbs of bombs perhaps a four-engined should carry about 8000lbs - mathematically simple but consistent with the other payload and weight figures.

I would also tend towards a 3-man crew like the Canberra - the tasks and technology the crew would have had to manage would have been reasonably similar.  Weight management would be critical to this aircraft to maintain the height/speed capabilities which would allow it to avoid most night fighter attacks.

Regards

GeorgeC

No confusion on my part between the two projects.

Anyhow George my original figures were based on a scale up using the maximum load to airframe tare figures of the B.MK IV and I never said the load was 16,000 lbs of BOMBS rather I was making a guesstimate of an airframe tare weight of around 29,000 - 30,000 lbs with an MTOW of 46,0000lbs...which was Buttler's figure. Anyhow my "dimensional" scaling factor was not a direct 1.5X (that came from the 1/72 to 1/48th comparo) but rather 1.6X.

B. Mk. IV tare weight was13,400 lbs, MTOW was 21,462 lbs. Load factor of 1.6.

Lancaster tare weight was 37,000 lbs, MTOW was 65,000 lbs in the I, II, IX, 68,000lbs for the VII. Load factors of 1.75 and 1.83 respectively.

Halifax III tare was 38,900 lb, MTOW 65,000 lb with 13,000 lb of bombs. Load factor of 1.67.

So using the known figure of 46,000 lbs and multiplying by .62 (factor generated by dividing the B.Mk.IV tare of 13,400 by the MTOW of 21,462) we arrive at an airframe weight of 28,520...more than double the tare of the Mosquito. I then added a fudge factor for weight increase caused by airframe growth and pushed it up to between 29,000 lbs (ideal) and 30,000 lbs (more likely). The resulting load factor is in the 1.5 range...less than both the Halifax and the Lancaster, and thus entirely within the range of possibility.

An 8,000lb bomb load would be at the top end, 10,000 lbs of fuel and 6,000 lbs of bombs would be more likely for a long-range mission.

Cheers, Jon

[GeorgeC]

Jon,

The confusion was certainly not yours but in the quote from Greg Gobel's website which had associated a 16,000lb bomb load with the twin-Sabre project, closer, as you point out, to the the aircraft's tare weight than its intended bombload of 4000lbs.  It is interesing that the MkXVI could double its bombload by addressing a volume issue, bulged doors to carry one big fat 'cookie' compared to 4 streamlined 500lbs, rather than power or basic structure issues.  Your meticulous calculations certainly beat my 'double the engines double the bombs' rule of thumb!  

Has anyone a view on crewing this beast.  The DH team fought off many attempts to impose weight, mainly guns and turrets, on the basic design and would proabably have taken the same approach to the 4-engined ac.  Could a single pilot physically handle this much larger aircraft all the way to Berlin and back?  Would one 'nav' be able to handle all the other tasks?

Regards

GeorgeC

[jcf]

Has anyone a view on crewing this beast.  The DH team fought off many attempts to impose weight, mainly guns and turrets, on the basic design and would proabably have taken the same approach to the 4-engined ac.  Could a single pilot physically handle this much larger aircraft all the way to Berlin and back?  Would one 'nav' be able to handle all the other tasks?

Don't see why you'd need another pilot, Halifax and Lancaster were both single pilot aircraft.
As to crew, three would be most likely: pilot, bomb aimer/navigator and flight engineer/radio opreator would be the likely mix. As in the other heavies the flight engineer would assist the pilot during tkeoff and landing.

I'm also thinking that putting the pilot offset to port under a bubble canopy, Canberra style, would look very cool.


Cheers, Jon

[kitnut617]

Interestingly and according to Tony Buttler's book British Secret Projects-Fighters & Bombers 1935-1950, while de Havilland was in the design stage of the DH.98, one of the options they were looking at was a single engined Napier Sabre version (page 77 for those that have the book).  This would have had a wing span of 47ft.  It goes on to say that the twin Merlin version was a scaled up design of this design.  It suggests then that a Sabre engined Mosquito would have looked similar but smaller.

Robert

[jcf]

Interestingly and according to Tony Buttler's book British Secret Projects-Fighters & Bombers 1935-1950, while de Havilland was in the design stage of the DH.98, one of the options they were looking at was a single engined Napier Sabre version (page 77 for those that have the book).  This would have had a wing span of 47ft.  It goes on to say that the twin Merlin version was a scaled up design of this design.  It suggests then that a Sabre engined Mosquito would have looked similar but smaller.

Robert

Yet the later Sabre "Super-Mossie" would have been an aircraft slightly larger than the Mossie.


The thing to keep in mind about a Sabre-engined Mossie is that De Havilland's would likely not have used a "beard" radiator installation...such an aesthetic monstrosity would have given Geoffrey palpitations.

A twin Sabre Beaufighter or P-38 on the other hand...

Cheers, Jon

[Howard of Effingham]

suggestions please for a radial engined mossie...  

airfix 1/72 mkII/VI/XVIII mosquito kit and two aeroclub bristol hercules engines are
starting things off.

i was thinking of a NMF USAAF example but i am sure some will have some suitably
interesting suggestions as the USAAF example in azure blue with a red tail that is in
the 1/48 airfix mossie is also appealing.

trevor

[simmie]

didn't the Argintinians build something that looked a lot like that??