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Showing posts with label Flying boat. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Flying boat. Show all posts

Thursday, June 18, 2026

Short Sunderland Mark V

Short Sunderland Mark V

Extract from Wikipedia:
The Short S.25 Sunderland is a British flying boat patrol bomber. The aircraft took its service name from the port of Sunderland in North East England.

The Sunderland was fitted with various offensive and defensive armaments, including machine gun turrets, bombs, aerial mines, and depth charges. The Sunderland was powered by four Bristol Pegasus XVIII radial engines and was fitted with various detection equipment to aid combat operations, including the Leigh searchlight, the ASV Mark II and ASV Mark III radar units, and an astrodome.

During WW2, the type was heavily involved in Allied efforts to counter the threat posed by German U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic. On 17 July 1940, an RAAF Sunderland performed the type's first unassisted U-boat kill.

During the post-war era, use of the Sunderland throughout Europe rapidly declined, while greater numbers remained in service in the Far East, where large developed runways were less prevalent. Several squadrons of RAF Sunderlands saw combat action during the Korean War. Around a dozen aircraft also participated in the Berlin airlift.

Several examples have been preserved, including a single airworthy Sunderland which has been placed on display in Florida at Fantasy of Flight.
Cutaway drawing of Short Sunderland Mk. II
Captions might be in Russian


The WWII Flying Porcupine With 16 Guns
IsonzoEnjoyer


The Leigh Light, an unusual device used by British aircraft to combat German submarines U-boat WW2
JOHN WAKE

Monday, June 8, 2026

Supermarine Walrus

Supermarine Walrus

First flight was in 1933. 740 were made before the end of WW2. The Walrus rescued 1,000 Allied fliers who had been shot down over water. It was not a fast airplane:
  • maximum speed 135 MPH
  • cruise         92 MPH
  • landing speed  57 MPH
Landing speed was so low it could land on a carrier despite not having a tailhook. 



Supermarine Walrus in Action
Imagination Strikes


Supermarine Walrus Mk.I - 3D Showcase 4k!
Martocticvs

A Walrus was sent on a secret mission to rescue Madame DeGaulle from France in June 1940: THE WALRUS THAT NEVER RETURNED WHAT WENT WRONG

Thursday, June 4, 2026

Philippine Clipper

Philippine Clipper Arrives Hong Kong October 23, 1936

Wikipedia:

The Martin M-130 was a quad-engined commercial flying boat designed and produced in 1935 by the Glenn L. Martin Company in Baltimore, Maryland, for Pan American Airways. Intended to fly transpacific flights, three airframes were built: the China Clipper, the Philippine Clipper and the Hawaii Clipper. A similar flying boat design called the Martin 156 and named Russian Clipper, was later built for the Soviet Union; it had a larger wing (giving it greater range) and twin vertical stabilizers.

Martin named them the Martin Ocean Transports, but to the public they were the China Clippers, a name that became a generic term for Pan Am's large flying boats - including, retroactively, the smaller Sikorsky S-42 (first flown in 1931) and larger Boeing 314 (first flown in 1938).

All three aircraft were lost while in service. Hawaii Clipper disappeared in 1938 on a flight over the Pacific, Philippine Clipper flew into a mountain in poor conditions in 1943, and finally in 1945 China Clipper broke up during landing at Trinidad and Tobago. In their time, they blazed trails as one of the first aircraft types to operate transpacific routes (some of the longest airline routes at the time) and also served as transports during World War II.



Martin M-130: Three Born to Conquer the Pacific, Three Lost to History
Retro Transport

San Francisco to Manila

Trans Pacific Air Mail Stamp


Saturday, February 14, 2026

Saturday, January 17, 2026

Russian Be-200

Russian Be-200 and Italian Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft

Not something you see everyday. From Wikipedia: The Beriev Be-200 Altair is a jet-powered amphibious flying boat. It has a capacity of 3,200 US gallons of water, or up to 72 passengers.

Ämari Lennubaas Military Air Base Estonia

The Italian Typhoon took off from the Amari Air Base in Estonia.


Sunday, October 5, 2025

SUPERMARINE WALRUS


RARE SUPERMARINE WALRUS TO FLY AGAIN
GULL PERCH FLYER

Cool video. I like the way he has combined old footage, animation and new stuff. The Vought Kingfisher was the American version of this airplane. The PBY Catalina was also big in search and rescue. The Walrus was tiny compared to the Catalina. The Walrus was a quarter of the weight and had less than half the wingspan.

Monday, September 22, 2025

Beriev Be-12

Drone's eye view of Russian Beriev Be-12 flying boat

Ukraine sent drones to attack a Russian base in Crimea and blew up a couple of flying boats and a helicopter. Still trying to adjust my thinking to accommodate the idea that weapons can give you eye-witness view of their own destruction. I mean, it was only last week that video cameras cost zillions of dollars.

Beriev Be-12

The Be-12 is a big airplane. The wingspan is a hundred feet, it's a hundred feet long and it weighs 25 tons. For comparison, the PBY Catalina is only 65 feet long and weighs 10 tons. The Japanese US-2 is about 10% longer and wider and has four engines. First flight was in 1960, so the design is like 65 years old. The Russians built 150 of them.

Thursday, February 13, 2025

PBY Catalina Night Attack


Story Of The Black Cats | Stealth flying boat of the South Pacific (1944)
Armored Archivist

The Catalina is one of my favorite airplanes, but these night time bombing missions are new to me.
The Navy Times story mentions the Attu Zero, which I suspect means this airplane.


Kind of curious that I take an interest in these stories about events that happened 80 years ago, but we seem to have an endless supply of new wars, most of which I don't pay attention to. Perhaps it's because the number of people killed in new wars in one year amounts to one day's worth of carnage from WW2.

Saturday, June 1, 2024

Beriev Be-200

Beriev Be-200

What do we have here? Looks like a small Russian jet airliner, but why are the engines above the wings?


Aviation Takeoff Beriev Be-200 Altair multipurpose amphibious aircraft
Aviation Up&Down

Oh, it's a flying boat, that's why. This is the only jet powered model in the world.

Update April 2026 replaced missing video. Something about the government requested that it be taken down. Maybe something to do with the interior shots?

Sunday, April 9, 2023

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.


Monday, September 5, 2022

Gweduck Flying Boat

Gweduck Flying Boat

Very cool. 

The Ellison-Mahon Gweduck is a modern, twin engine amphibious aircraft, built from composites and closely resembling the Grumman Widgeon. It was designed and is built in the United States and was first flown in 2009. - Wikipedia

It's a kitplane. The kits are produced by Composite Creations of Prineville.

The name comes from a large grotesque clam that inhabits the Pacific Coast of North America.

Via Business Tribune.


Saturday, July 23, 2022

More Consolidated PBY Catalina

PBY Catalina Tune-up

I don't know, but I suspect those two guys (there are two of them, you can see another pair of legs dangling, presumably from the guy sitting on the other side of the engine), these two guys are trying to diagnose some kind of a problem. Examining the engine while it was not running didn't produce any evidence of the problem, so they fired up the engines to see if they could figure it out. I suspect the seats are part of the normal maintenance rigging, whether they are on land or water. During the war, I wouldn't be surprised if they the left the aircraft sitting in the water instead of driving up on the land every time they landed. Shoot, some places probably didn't have any ramps onto the land.

Notice the big bulb attached to the top of the cockpit. It's a radome which means this is probably from 1945.

Previous Catalina post.

I came across this picture on my one of the sites I regularly visit, but I failed to make a note of it and now I don't know where I found it.


Friday, July 8, 2022

Consolidated PBY Catalina

1944 Consolidated PBY Catalina

Over 3,000 were built during the 1930s and -40s. The Soviet Union built 27. Seems weird that they would go to all the trouble to get set up to build this airplane and then only build 27 of them, but then there are the exigencies on war.


Friday, May 13, 2022

Grumman Gosling on Lake Hood

Grumman G-44 Widgeon on Lake Hood

WW2 era Grumman G-44 Widgeon, otherwise know as the Gosling, baby brother to the Grumman Goose. The Gosling could carry five people, the Goose could carry ten. Only about 300 were made of each, not like the tens of thousands of fighter aircraft that were produced during the war.

But where's Lake Hood? Seems like I ought to know, we've got Hood River (river and town) and Mt. Hood an hour east of Portland, but no Lake Hood. Seattle maybe? Nope - Anchorage Alaska. It's a tiny little lake right in the middle of town and totally taken up with seaplanes.


Welcome to Lake Hood (LHD)
Federal Aviation Administration

They mention two IFR (Instrument Flight Rating) airports nearby, that would be Ted Stevens International, the commercial airport, and Elmendorf Air Force Base. Looking around I find there are also a whole bunch of smaller airstrips in Anchorage. Place might be the airport capital of the world.


Anchorage Airports




Saturday, November 16, 2019

Japanese US2 Flying Boat


【4K】US 2 父島での訓練 Part5
([4K] US 2 Training in Chichijima Part5)

The video is a little slow moving, but it is a big, expensive aircraft, so you want to be careful. Engine startup begins before the one minute mark. after that:
2:10 aircraft starts moving, but the motion is barely perceptible for about 15 seconds
2:50 nose wheel touches the water, using reverse thrust to slow their descent into the water.
3:25 aircraft is afloat
3:45 landing gear retracts
5:45 the aircraft has turned sideways and one of crew is waving, or maybe he's just wiping the window
7:05 break in recording, airplane has completed its turn into open water
7:35 break, aircraft continues taxiing across the harbor
8:24 break, spectators standing on the breakwater
8:32 break, wide shot of breakwater with aircraft in the distance
8:42 break, aircraft maneuvering, rock in foreground
9:42 break, aircraft begins takeoff run

Flying boats are the epitome of cool. They were the first aircraft to cross the oceans, reducing days of travel time to hours. Plus all the people who flew on them were cool. Of course they were cool, they were rich and could afford to buy fancy clothes that made them look cool. Plus Jimmy Buffett had one, and what could be more cool that island hopping in the Caribbean in your own private flying boat? I mean this is the stuff of a million fantasies.

Recorded on October 23 at Ogasawara Village, Chichijima Futami Port

The ramp is clearly visible on a satellite image:
Chichijima Aircraft Ramp
Okinawa (center left), Chichijima (center), Iwo Jima (just below Chichijima)
Chichijima is really out in the middle of nowhere. It is about 600 miles from Tokyo, 900 miles from Okinawa and just over 100 miles from Iwo Jima.

I think the US-2 was the largest operational flying boat for a while. It has recently been eclipsed by one from China, which might be operational.

Sunday, June 16, 2019

Douglas World Cruisers

Daring young men with their flying machine
I'm reading The Flying Tigers by Sam Kleiner and I come across this line:
"Gibbons grew up in Seattle, and he was only thirteen when four Douglas World Cruisers took off from a nearby lake in the successful attempt to circumnavigate the globe by air." [last page of chapter 3].
Douglas World Cruisers? Never heard of them before. Seems the Army was eager to make it big in the flying game so they contracted the Douglas Aircraft Company to build them four airplanes specifically to fly around the world. They made it all the way around, or at least some of them did, though it took them six months.

Seattle II Reproduction Douglas World Cruiser
Now some guys in Seattle are trying to duplicate this adventure with a reproduction Douglas World Cruiser. They were going to try going this year, the 95th anniversary, but they've decided to wait one more year.

Flight Plan of the Douglas World Cruiser
A couple other round-the-world flight have made been mentioned in this blog. Howard Hughes made a round-the-world flight in 1938, there was the flying boat that made the round-the-world flight at the opening of WW2, and then there were the Russians who flew over the North Pole.


Saturday, August 5, 2017