A Mystery Mosquito Fuselage

[Dave Homewood]

Denys Jones of Ferrymead Aeronautical Society in Christchurch was given this photo many years ago, and he apologises that he cannot recall who he got it from, but he'd love to solve the mystery of where this is and who it belonged to. Plus which Mossie it was.

It had been attributed to being on the Holdaway family farm at Blenheim, but Denys said he visited both Holdaway brothers' farms when he collected the remains of Hudson NZ2035 together from them, and he reckons there were no stands of pine trees on either farm like this.

Does anyone here know more details please?

[shorty]

Can we gwt a close up of the guy? That may help.

[eieio]

The Fuse at Central road ,Lower Moutere was backed by trees ,as viewed from the road. I lived across the road from it while picking tobacco .Interesting that there were Holdaways living there,I think they may have owned the carcase.

[Dave Homewood]

Great stuff, thanks Bruce.

This is as big as I was supplied Nev, I'll see if Denys can scan it larger.

[Dave Homewood]

Hey Bruce, what year/s were you living there please?

[nuuumannn]

There was a Mossie fuselage at Central Road, Lower Moutere? I drive past there every day.

Interesting image. Looking at the camouflage, it looks like it wears Medium Sea Grey with Dark green disruptive camouflage, it looks too washed out to tell if there is a difference between the upper and lower surfaces, which means that it wears all over Medium Sea Grey; the top surfaces were nominally Ocean Grey. FB.VIs were painted in these colours, although it was also a night fighter scheme.

[denysjones]

This seems all to be starting to make some sense.

I've compared the view and the pine trees to John Smith's property as you see in this image

www.mossie.org/images/NZ2336/Brendon_Deere/mosmapua.jpg

and had wondered if it was at his place but it may well fit Lower Moutere as well.

As to identity of the beast well in the Aviation Historical Society Journal Vol4 page 41 there is mention by Charles Darby of five Mossies being at Lower Moutere but giving serials for only four namely '06, '21, TA578 (which was to have been '60) and RF885 (which was to have been '77).

In the Aug 1986 edition of the same journal in the major history of the Mosquito in NZ there is a table (not claimed to be exhaustive) giving known code letters and serial for a/c used by 75Sqn. In that list '06 appears but the other three do not so I'd say that that makes a reasonable statement that those three probably never saw service here and so would have still been in their original ex-RAF delivery camouflage at the time of their disposal.

I have several photos of different Mosquitos at Woodbourne about the time of the disposal all wearing the same pattern camouflage and either still with just their RAF serial on them or with a roughly marked NZ one just above it. The fact that Charles refers to '21 by it's NZ serial probably suggests that that was painted on it while his quoting the other pair by RAF serials suggests that they were devoid of NZ ones.

Could it be that Charles only gave four serial because one of the a/c was devoid of a serial and if so that dangles a tantalising carrot that perhaps the one in the picture (which is a shortened fuselage and hence may well not be with serial on it) is a candidate to be the fifth.

I'm sorry for the quality of the photo I gave to Dave but I was sent it in electronic form so that's as good as it gets I'm afraid.

[agile]

What is in the foreground in the pic Denys linked to?

[shorty]

Vampire fuselage

[Dave Homewood]

Denys and I discussed that yesterday, he says it's a Vampire pod.

[nuuumannn]

I thought it was a young lady in a red top and black trousers, myself Yep, it's a Vampire pod; the distinctive oval air intake is a giveaway.

Interesting information Denys; I was not aware that the New Zealand ones still retained their British camouflage. Can any one tell me whereabouts on Central Road was the Mosquito fuselage located? That forested area looks rather thick, although granted the area has changed a lot since that photo was taken, assuming it was taken on Central Road, but Central road is largely farmland and orchards now, so a comparison might not be possible.

[baz62]

Oct 3, 2013 11:27:45 GMT 12 nuuumannn said:

I thought it was a young lady in a red top and black trousers, myself Yep, it's a Vampire pod; the distinctive oval air intake is a giveaway.

Interesting information Denys; I was not aware that the New Zealand ones still retained their British camouflage. Can any one tell me whereabouts on Central Road was the Mosquito fuselage located? That forested area looks rather thick, although granted the area has changed a lot since that photo was taken, assuming it was taken on Central Road, but Central road is largely farmland and orchards now, so a comparison might not be possible.

Not 100% sure but think only the unused Mosquitos in storage were still in RAF markings?

[Dave Homewood]

Quite a number of the aircraft retained their camouflage, yes.

And there seems to be a myth that sixty or so of the Mosquitoes went into storage and were never touched again. From what I have learned from talking to people in the hangar crew, the stored aircraft were all run monthly and kept in tip top condition, and they rotated in and out of squadron service regularly as the squadron aircraft needed overhauls. So it seems far more than 20 aircraft served with No. 75 Squadron, and one of the mechanics told me pretty much all of them saw active flying time in the squadron.

[denysjones]

I'd have to agree with some of those points and dispute others Dave :-)

True the a/c were hauled out and given the once over on a regular basis but my info is that was not done by the RNZAF but by DeHavilland's personnel from Rongotai. The father of one of our members at Ferrymead was in charge of the DeHav personnel details that went to do the work and he personally told me of that.

Also if a large percentage saw service then how come firstly so many were still in camouflage and of those so many had no RNZAF serial at all on them. Further when you look at the details of the tenders there was a batch of 18 and another of 28 a/c sans engines, one batch of six were described as "WARB-declared (wings cutoff)", one batch of seven described as "fuselages only", one of 4 had only one engine each.

I'd read into that there had been a lot of cannibalisation of the stored aircraft to keep the others in the air. Don't forget that HR339 (NZ2382) was en route to storage at Taeri when she had her accident at Wigram and the engines and props were promptly removed from her so that suggests something to me about the spares holding (and some other time we can get started on the matter of the marks of merlin actually fitted to the a/c that arrived here).

Looking at the appearance of many of the a/c hauled outside for disposal I can't believe that had they relatively recently been in service use then they could have got to that state that quickly. Have you seen the well-known picture of the hangar lot at Woodbourne? They look to me like they've been sitting around for a fair while. Don't forget they'd come out of MUs in the UK to start with and their preparation for flight to NZ didn't even always go as far was removing the external PX preservative from the Merlins (trust me I've talked to one of the ferry pilots about what went on there).

There was a quantity of a/c stored at Ohakea separate from the Woodbourne and Taeri storages and I could accept that those Ohakea ones could have received the care and saw the service you've had described to you but I'd take a lot of convincing that it applied to the whole lot. (As from Ohakea there appear to have been only 9 aircraft tendered off so I'd suggest that they were the storage ones plus those that couldn't make it away from there to Woodbourne at the end of service as a large number of the silver ex-75 a/c were at Woodbourne.)

There's so much to unravel about the mossies!

[Dave Homewood]

OK, my mistake, it was only those stored at Ohakea that saw regular rotation through the squadron then. I believe they had a hangar full of stored reserve aircraft. or was it two hangars?

I know an ex-member of the hangar gang and he was a Cpl RNZAF at the time. There was a separate RNZAF unit from the squadron that maintained these stored aircraft, he was never on No. 75 Squadron. And he said all the aircraft stored there saw active service at one time or another rotating through.

Those two hangar fires in which Mossies were destroyed were on that unit, not No. 75 Squadron.

So as I said there were more than the 20 on squadron at any one time that saw active NZ service.

[eieio]

Dave ,I was at central road Feb/June 1963. From Motueka cross Edwards road and about a half mile ,maybe more , the mozz was on the left . Last time I was having a sticky beak in that area agriculture sure had changed the face of the earth. Oh yeah ,I returned home by Friendship ,Viscount and Dakota to Whakatane airport the day before the Kaimai crash.

[nuuumannn]

From Motueka cross Edwards road and about a half mile, maybe more, the mozz was on the left.

Thanks for the tip; this is just down the road from me. Denys, thanks for the extra info on the Mosquitoes in British markings; I had no idea we had aircraft flown over and used purely for spares; was it always intended that way or did the RNZAF originally intend of refurbishing all of them for service?

[skyhawkdon]

So where is this fuselage now?

[Dave Homewood]

Don, that's the 64 Million Dollar question!

Grant, the RNZAF intended originally to equip four squadrons with Mosquitoes but as time went on with the massive number of people leaving the RNZAF postwar and the cutbacks in funding for the 'Interim Air Force' as it was called, this was sadly cut back to one squadron. It would be interesting to know which squadrons would have been equipped. As No. 2 (BR) Squadron was still active no doubt it would have been retained alongside No. 75 Squadron rather than being renamed as such.

Bruce, thanks for those road directions. I note on Google Earth/Maps it seems to be all hops fields along that road now. But when you come to the end of the road it it's a T-intersection on to Holdaway Road - so the photo's original file name ties in beautifully here!

[Dave Homewood]

Actually Grant it might be worth you doing some door knocking with that photo and see what people in the road recall of that fuselage. You just never know if it might be sitting in a shed there!!