Look! Up in the sky!

[Kirbstone]

OK guys, Try this one.

Short_Sunderland.jpg

From other angles they looked very dumpy indeed, but they were great load carriers and bombers as well.

Short_Sunderland_Mk_V.jpg

I have a lovely anecdote about Sir Geoffrey De Havilland. In 1947 he was test flying his floatplane, the Beaver (It had a nine cylinder radial engine), which also had a wheeled version. Having taken off from the Solent at Cowes, Sir Geoffrey put the aircraft through its paces and eventually lined up on final approach to an aerodrome in the Isle of Wight, when his co-pilot politely reminded him that he was flying the floatplane version. Sir G. promptly powered her up again and made a normal landing back on the Solent, taxiing up to a mooring buoy at Cowes, opened the cockpit external door and promptly stepped out into the water!

BeaverOnFloats 1947.jpg

Tom K.

[Kirbstone]

.....but I still like the Catalina.

Catalina pretty.jpg

Perhaps I'm biased, as when I was in a previous incarnation I built a kit flying model of one powered by two electric motors, which I unfortunately crashed, as it was the very devil to fly...the thrust line was so high over the dragging floats that it overtaxed my model piloting skills at the time. The motors didn't like being immersed in water!

Tom

[Big and Bashful]

All brilliant photos and a good anecdote about Sir Geoff!

Thanks be to you!

[crfriend]

Sorry, I still don't think the catalina is a good looking aircraft. (That's being polite!).

I don't know about that. I find the Catalina "interesting" to look at because as a hybrid it has to do two things with one body -- and, like most hybrids, does neither one of them particularly well. Too, the PBY dates from a period of time where there weren't a lot of hard runways around, and there was quite a lot of interest in "flying boats" as they don't require runways (as such).

An exceptionally good read on the development of the flying boat, and of the early history of that iconic US airline Pan American Airways (later simply "Pan Am"), is China Clipper by Robert L. Gandt. (ISBN: 0-87021-209-5)

An interesting aside is that the name "Pan AM" lives on -- as does its logo -- but now it graces railroad locomotives and cars in New England.

[Uncle Al]

Try the Martin MARS Flying boat:!:











Worlds largest flying boat, also used to fight forest fires.


Uncle Al

[Kirbstone]

Absolutely beautiful pics Uncle Al.
The Martin is certainly the Daddy of them all, and quite a looker, too. In a way, it's a pity the wartime materials restrictions forced Howard Hughes to build his 'Spruce Goose' out of wood. It's also amazing that the thing flew at all. The Martin of course was and is much more practical.

Tom

[Big and Bashful]

Ooh! The Martin doesn't half look like a Flying Porcupine, just without the guns etc. Looks like a Sunderland might have been it's father!

[crfriend]

Bonus points to anybody who can state why many of the early boats either had glassed-in noses or, more frequently, glassed-in roofs to their cockpits.

[Big and Bashful]

To improve visibility due to the spray during take off or landing?

[crfriend]

To improve visibility due to the spray during take off or landing?

Nope, but nice try.

The Sunderland has both the forward station and the cockpit that offer 180 x 90 visibility. There's a reason for this. Even some mid 1960s Soviet era civilian aircraft sported glazed noses for the same reason.

Where do we go now?

Al -- Thanks for the shots of the MARS. Those are truly spectacular craft, and it's nice to know that there's at least one still flying.

[skirted_in_SF]

Celestial navigation?

[crfriend]

Celestial navigation?

Precisely!

Recall that the heyday of the flying boat preceded the development of modern radio-navigation gear so finding one's way at night was done by compass and, where one was out of sight of manmade illumination, the stars. That seems mind-boggling in today's world with GPS as pervasive as it is. I don't know if optical instruments are still is use in the cockpit, but even today, aircraft carry magnetic compasses as a navigation tool.

In fact one of the drivers for some of the earliest radionavigation beacons was the island-hopping route to the Orient flown by boats -- and they had to find these islands, sometimes not much more than awash rocks with lagoons, in the dark on pretty much the first try as the fuel loads dictated how far they could fly and things were pretty tight at the time. Eventually radio beacons covered the populated regions and obsoleted the old ways, and now GPS and other satellite systems threaten to do that to the beacon-"illuminated" flyways of today. Time and technology march on.

[Big and Bashful]

Not so surprising I suppose, even a Trident missile takes a star sighting to help firm up it's trajectory calculations.