PBY Catalina 5593V

Wrecked Catalina Seaplane in Saudi Arabia

I'm watching a video about some Egyptian MiGs attacking the Israeli airbase Ofir near the southern tip of Sinai during the Yom Kipper War (October 1973). Two Israeli F-4 Phantoms shoot down 6 or 7 MiGs. Sounds about par for any Hebrew versus Musselman encounter.

Straits of Tiran

But now I'm thinking, didn't I put a post about this area once before? I did: The Straits of Tiran. Look at the map and there is an airport there and it looks very similar to the one in the video, but it's called the Sharm El Sheikh International Airport now.

The land looks pretty desolate, but there seem to be people here, so what's it look like on Streetview? Click the little yellow man and not much shows up, there's some blue lines about ten miles south along the coast, and there's some across the strait in Saudi Arabia. There doesn't look to be much of anything there, but I drag the little yellow man to the southern end of the blue line and look what jumps out at me (top).

I'm thinking this is an old WW2 wreck, but when I go looking I find no, it's not WW2, it's more recent:

PBY Catalina N5593

The Abandoned Consolidated PBY Catalina Seaplane of Saudi Arabia

During 1960, Mr. Thomas Kendall, a retired businessman, with his luxury converted Catalina PBY, registration N5593V, landed on the sandy coast of Ras Al-Sheik Hameed, with his wife and children. On the following day’s after anchoring the flying yacht, they were ambushed by bedouins of the Saudi Arabian army, who mistakenly believed it to be a military attack. The firing lasted for about 30–40mins, to which Mr. Thomas and his family were able to swim back to the aircraft, but with him being wounded, managed to move it just 800 meters. After being captured by the Bedouins, Mr. Thomas and his family were eventually taken to Jeddah, endlessly interrogated and set free, with the help of the American ambassador, Mr. Donald R. Heath.