When the world’s last airworthy Mosquito fighter-bomber crashed at a British air show in 1996, the tragic deaths of the two men on board the Second World War-era plane were compounded by the heartbreaking loss to global aviation heritage.
“It’s a shame,” one Canadian vintage-aircraft expert said at the time. “There may never be another one getting up in the air.”
The crash-site fireball that consumed two lives and the only “Wooden Wonder” still flying appeared certain to silence the Mosquito’s famous buzz forever. But another of its kind – a Canadian-built de Havilland Mosquito that was almost written off as junk when it was discovered rotted and rusted in an Alberta farm field in the 1970s – has soared back into the sky after an eight-year, multinational, multimillion-dollar restoration.
The born-again warbird, first flown in September in New Zealand, will make a highly anticipated “homecoming” appearance this spring at an air show in Hamilton – just a short hop from the site of de Havilland’s Downsview aircraft factory in Toronto, where it was built in 1945.
The plane’s planned comeback to this country will mark the culmination of an unprecedented rebuild headed by U.S. vintage-plane buff Jerry Yagen and helped along with bits and pieces of another Canadian-made Mosquito recovered from an airfield dump site and – remarkably – a nearby fence post in Kenora, Ont.
The newly rebuilt plane, Mosquito FB26-KA114, had rolled off the Toronto assembly line just as the war was ending and never went overseas.