The main reason for covered bridges is to protect the timbers supporting the bridge from the weather so they don’t rot prematurely.
Done correctly, wood structures are both strong and light, very important for aircraft.
1 Like
I hope that photo is of a model; I have built model airplanes and yeah they use wood; the landing gear on that plane in the photo are not of an actual warplane; a model?; I cant believe that a ww2 warplane would be using wood struts; also: the fuselage appears to be model airplane plastic and not aluminum; unless the UK ran out of aluminum during the war ;
Some British WW2 airplanes used plywood from Wisconsin. There was an article in the Wisconsin Magazine of History a couple years back.
The de Havalland Mosquito, aka the timber terror, the loping lumberyard, the wooden wonder, was indeed made of wood and fabric.
The Bellanca Viking uses wood (along with fabric) for the wings
Didn’t Howard Hughes invent a wooden airplane in the 1930’s or 40’s, nick-named the Spruce Goose?
Yeah, although it was made of birch, not spruce.
Interestingly, he also played with cars. He had a '53 Roadmaster that had a 12v electrical system and a separate 24v electrical system which ran the custom air conditioner, complete with dust and anti-bacterial filters, to keep the car cool. Good thing, because his germaphobia extended to the car mods - all the windows except the driver door were sealed, as were the fresh air vents.
He would also use the 24v side to ground-start airplanes.
Now that you are talking WWII planes, check out the wooden Higgens boats made in New Orleans. Wood you could still get but metal, rubber, and gas were hard to come by due to the war effort. And one thing about those LAM beams and OSB, you don’t want to get them wet, but solid wood ramps can be made of pretty much any kind of wood except balsa and maybe bamboo. Oh oh, back to cars.
I woodn’t (sic) discount either of those possibilities. I’m betting someone sufficiently knowledgeable could design a perfectly safe ramp from paper (think corrugated paperboard) but you wouldn’t want to get those wet either 
Unless the car is obscenely heavy, you could just get a ream of typing paper and park the car on it with no danger.
The main weak point with paper is that it “explodes” under too much pressure. Probably wouldn’t happen under a car, but there are videos where people try to fold paper more than 7 times with a hydraulic press, but it bursts before they can. Turns out there’s calcium in a lot of paper, and that fractures violently under too much pressure and leaves behind something that looks like paper but crumbles like sand.
As for bamboo, it resists compression better than concrete. You’d probably be fine. 
There’s a company that makes structural beams out of bamboo, and there’s talk that it might replace carbon fiber in bicycle racing.
I like the ream idea 
I just bought another electric dirtbike to run around the property and the packaging had some spacers made from corrugated paperboard that was unbelievably strong. I could not crush it to put in recycling bin. It eventually went in as is. In fact it was glued to the base “cardboard” with something that resembled hot melt glue and could not break them apart either. That cardboard was nearly hardboard as well. Amazing stuff…
Yeah, I bought a new bandsaw and it came in this absolute armor of cardboard. No folding this stuff to get it in the recycle can. I had to get out the handsaw.