An incredibly rare World War II aircraft will have its first public outing in almost 70 years this weekend.
The rare De Havilland Mosquito bomber was salvaged from the shed of Māpua-based collector John Smith in 2020.
Photo: Supplied
Alistair Marshall manages the John Smith Mosquito Project and has been in charge of the aircraft's preservation.
There are only 31 Mosquitos still in existence and only 5 of these have engines that run, he tells Jesse Mulligan.
Listen to the interview
The Mosquito bomber was constructed of plywood and balsa, Marshall says.
“This one is 77 years old and so typically, they don't store well, they have to be stored very carefully for them to be structurally sound.
“John, who owned this airplane for 62 years, he did take very good care of it. And it is structurally sound. And up until the 1970s, he periodically ran the engines himself.
"We did a quite careful survey of the aircraft to make sure that we could do that without damage or harm to the machine."
A Royal Air Force de Havilland Mosquito flying in 1944 Photo: RAF / Wikimedia Commons
When they ran The Mosquito's engines last November - for the first time in years - they purred, Marshall says.
“[The plane] behaved like it had flown in there that morning. It was unexpected just how well it went. It's a big, old, complex, airplane, big Rolls Royce Merlin engines on this thing. And they both started up and ran.”
John Smith bought the plane complete in the 1950s and acquired a bunch of spare parts too, Marshall says.
“New Zealand had nearly 90 Mosquitoes after World War II and they came up for tender when they got retired in the mid-1950s.
“There was a lot of them around and John, even though he bought one complete, he still went fossicking and digging for bits and pieces so that we have a complete airplane, 100 percent complete, and there’s still three container loads of Mosquito spares in John's shed that went to a business in Auckland to restore them.”
The De Havilland Mosquito bomber will be on display - for a while with its engines running - this Sunday (ANZAC Day) at Omaka Airfield from 10am to 3pm.