Defeated By...A Lack Of Glue?: Focke-Wulf Ta 154 Moskito

The mosquito was glued,but also held together with tens of thousands of small brass screws “Never glue without a screw “

You could say the "thousand year Reich" has as much longevity as the glue on the Ta 154!

Actually, the Mustang mk.1(P51-A) with the Allison engine was really fast at low altitudes, so the Brits used them to great effect in the fast photo recon, ground attack and long range armed scouting roles. It was hardly a failure, except that the greater ongoing need was for high altitude bomber interception and dogfighting with escort fighters. Hence the effort to adapt the Merlin. Brilliant engineering by the Brits and great intuition by the procurement section.

Your introduction tangents never fail to make me happy.

Ta-154: suffers from shitty glue The entire range of Yak aircraft: "First time?"

The DH Mosquito had the entire wooden airframe built at furniture factories and transported to De Haviland for the final assembly. The Mosquito NF MkXXX in 1944 could reach 425mph fully loaded and was the fastest piston engine Night Fighter of WW2. However the British also had glue issues, though the glue worked great in moderate climates, it was not too good in hot and humid climates encountered in the Far East.

I made a 2 meter diameter hot air balloon at science camp in my teens with a camp buddy. We had a pattern supplied by the camp counselors, constructed it out of paper for the skin with multiple sections glued together using Elmers yellow glue, and reinforced with packaging string between the sections for extra strength. There was a sturdier paper board collar attached at the throat of the balloon that allowed it to be fitted over a stove pipe coming from a wood stove to provide the hot air. Three teams made balloons, but ours was the best and flew the best because my buddy and I focused on completing its construction, while the rest of our team and the other teams goofed off climbing the hills surrounding the camp.

Lack of specific glue. Meanwhile, De Havilland came up with something even better.

The DH Mosquito was in its element in the temperate European climate. When it was sent to the humid, tropical climate of the CBI theater, it wound up having the same problem with the glue not holding up as the Ta 154 and was soon withdrawn. FYI: German aircraft designations were the the first two letters of the manufacturer, or in the case of double named makers, the first letters of each name, e.g. Focke-Wulf - FW; Blohm und Voss - BV. Kurt Tank (Koort Tahnk, please), an aeronautical engineer and test pilot who led the design department at Focke-Wulf, was so well respected (the FW 200 and FW 190 were his designs) that he was the only designer to have two of his designs be given the 'Ta' designation rather then FW: the the high-speed/high-altitude Ta 152, an iteration of the FW 190; and the ill-fated Ta 154.

In Finland we too tried to make mostly wood construction fighter plane and it too failed, among other things but mostly because low quality wood glue, maybe domestic, maybe sourced from Germany. As far as i remember, especially parts of the tail tented to rip off in a dive with catastrophic results, the planes were called VL Myrsky.

Many thanks for this video! I've had a soft spot for this plane ever since I thought that one of my late grandfather's may have flown it! It freakishly turned out to be another German pilot with the same name and age (I found photos - def. a different person, that one being with the day fighters and then test pilots, my granddad being with the night fighters). At any rate, I managed to get my hands on "Focke-Wulf Nachtjäger Ta 154 "Moskito": Entwicklung, Produktion und Truppenerprobung" by Dietmar Herrmann. As a German engineer, he arguably wrote that book as the ultimate authority: he used the original plans, designs and was able, at the time of writing, to still speak with some of the designers, engineers and pilots. As the book is currently packed away due to construction, I can't immediately check, but I do dimly remember that, while the glue was a problem to a certain extent, it was not the top issue. That did still fall to the lack of suitable engines and, as so often, the N**i bureaucracy and infighting. Even when the engines were available, they weren't allocated with any priority to this program. They couldn't get this high enough up the flagpole (which generally meant somehow getting this inside the short attention span of the dude with the idiotic mustache).

Safe to say the Ta154 wasn't a plane to sniff at. More of a huffercraft.

To be fair, the Bf 110 and Ju88 were excellent night-fighters - they just had problems catching Mosquitos.

Interesting that Germany did not have enough carpenters for this project. One of the big successes of the Mosquito was that parts were made by small furniture makers and sent to De Havilland for assembly. But knowing that when Germany cancelled a number of defence contracts in 1943 the scientist and engineers from them ended up fighting on the Eastern Front I think that is where the furniture makers ended up. A couple of years ago I had a brief discussion on another YouTube channel about the poor quality of the glue Germany used during the war and he pointed out that the Germans were using slave labour to make the glue. And they were deliberately sabotaging the glue so that it would not work.

IIRC the factory producing the glue was in Wuppertal and wasn't directly attacked but was destroyed in the fires caused by the RAF bombing the city.

The Germans had rockets, jets, guided torpedoes, and assault rifles - but they were never able to match what the Americans had Americans: duct tape.

Apart from the defective substitute glue, what about the wood itself? De Haviland built the DH.98 Mosquito from wood because that was their preferred material, the argument that the project would not stress the supply of aircraft-grade aluminum was just icing on the cake. The pre-war de Haviland Albatross airliner had already proved the concept of high-performance all-wood construction aircraft. In designing the Albatross and later the Mosquito, de Haviland learned that the choice of wood was paramount to success. Their ideal material was birch plywood with balsa wood (ochroma) cores. Excellent birch was available from U.S. and Canadian sources, and balsa was available from Ecuador and other regions of South America. Later on, due to shortages they substituted American Sitka spruce for the balsa wood. Birch was also the prime material used in the Hughes Hercules flying boat, though it was unfairly and stupidly labeled the "Spruce Goose" by reporters. Without any background in designing all-wood construction aircraft, what sort of wood did Kurt Tank select for the Ta 154? There was abundant birch in Russia, but by 1943 Germany was on the retreat in Russia -- not a good situation for harvesting and transporting lumber. There was good spruce in Norway and Sweden, but that required transport by sea in ships, again not ideal for a new aircraft at that time in Nazi history.

The irony being that Germany had better fibreglas resins than they did wood-glue and could have sidestepped the whole issue if they'd thought to use fibreglas for more than firewalls....

Mosquito was the most adaptable and capable multi role aircraft of its time. Sexy and beautiful as well. Oh, Canada!

The DeHaviland museum has a sectioned part of a Mosquito wing. I was surprised to see that a lot of nails or roves were used in the construction. Nex time I go I'm taking a magnet to see of they are steel or duralamin nails.