Warbird Information Exchange

James: Fairchild AT-21. It's hard to tell if it's a true monocoque or a semi-m from the drawings. the entire aft section bolts to the forward section using a large, built-up ring bulkhead set, just aft of the rear spar. There are several bulkheads and stringer sets, that take the turret structural and firing loads and distrubute them to the skin. The tail assembly is attached via a steel tubing assembly thru a pair of ring bulkheads bonded to the skins.

Lockheed used the earliest version of the Duramold type process on the Vega and Orion designs way back in the early twenties. Fairchild bought the Duramold process from Clark after evaluating it on the Model 46 project in 1937. The same process was used by Hughes on the HK-1. The process produces some extremely strong parts, but they were way too labor intensive to produce profitably in the long run.

I've got some factory pictures in some of my stuff, but can't lay my hands on anything from my library due to it being in storage and I won't be able to dig into it much til sometime after the first of the year.

I was just wondering why the Mosquito is a side by side two seater (or?) when they went to so much trouble to make evrything else as slimline as possible. Wouldn´t a tandem seating arrangement have been better?

It's width is determined by the bomb bay. It is not true side by side seating, the second seat is actually to the rear and left toward the pilot

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Matt Gunsch, A&P, IA, Warbird maint and restorations
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Ah, thanks Matt - I thought there must be a good reason for it.