Bomber Command Museum in Nanton hosting a celebration for its Mosquito aircraft

Every year Nanton's Bomber Command Museum updates the public on the restoration of its Second World War Mosquito twin engine plane with an open house.

The project will be in its 13th year in August 2024 and to date volunteer restorers have put in more than 46,000 hours. Richard de Boer, the Calgary Mosquito Society president says the July 20th event is popular.

"It's an opportunity to come out, see the progress that we've made, see where donor dollars have gone into the airplane and to show off the incredible work that our volunteers are doing," he said.

At the weekend open house, de Boer will share stories from the people who flew the Mosquito, putting a face to the aircraft because he says the plane and the men who flew them are to be celebrated.

"The company de Havilland decided to use wood as the primary material to build the wings, the fuselage, the tail, all that sort of stuff," he said. "That was seen as old-fashioned and inappropriate, but it proved to be one of the best choices that they could have made.

"The Mosquito was the fastest airplane in the world for three or four years until the German jets came along, which exceeded the speed by quite a bit."

Valuable volunteers

Jack McWilliam is the head of restoration and coordinates the 15 or so volunteers working on the project. He says they're made up of retirees and students getting into the aerospace field.

McWilliams says the project has passed the half way stage, but warm southern Alberta temperatures are causing a delay on the restoration of the wings. They're covered in a thin sheet of plywood.

"We're having a heat problem right now because our glues," he said. "We need a cooler temperature otherwise the glue sets too quickly so we're having to hold off on the next skin that's ready for gluing well till the temperature cools down."

At the beginning of the Second World War, the de Havilland Mosquito was faster than any other fighter of its day. A total of 7, 781 were built in England, 1,134 of them manufactured just north of Toronto.

Today there are only 34 left, and only one able to still fly and it's the sister airplane of the Nanton Mosquito.

"Our airplane and that one came to Canada in the mid-1950s," said de Boer. "To do the first photo mapping of all of Canada with Spartan Air Services and the sister ship to ours is in Kelowna BC and that is the only original flying mosquito in the world today."

Delayed restoration

In 2022 the war in Ukraine delayed the restoration because the specialized plywood that covers the aircraft was made in Russia. It took de Boer a year to source what the project needed from New Zealand.

"The first batch of plywood that we bought for this airplane over 10 years ago now was running about $850 a sheet," he said. "It's incredibly expensive, for the 13 sheets that we ended up getting just for the wing you could have bought yourself a decent little car for that."

Gary Tofflemire is a volunteer focused on woodworking. He's replacing the covering of the wings and painstakingly removes  the screws and glue to hold them together. He re-uses materials when he can but the brass screws used 80 years ago are hard to save.

"We can inspect them and some are straight then we clean them," he said. "We bought 1,500 brand new replacement screws, number five inch and a quarter, flathead sloth drive wood screws for the job."

Nanton's Bomber Command Museum is celebrating the Mosquito twin-engine at a number of weekend open houses.

Like Tofflemire, volunteer Andy Woerle has been on the project for over a decade and his focus is on the cockpit.

"Part of the challenge has been not getting authentic British instruments but finding what Spartan put in and largely we found that they put a lot of American stuff in and replaced the British stuff," he said.

Woerle says working on the aircraft over the last number of years has brought him a lot of joy.

"I've been kind of a fan of World War Two airplanes since I was a young kid," he said. "Getting the chance to work on this has been just fantastic."

Learn more about the Mosquito restoration and the July 20th open house here: www.calgarymosquitosociety.com