DRM
Guru
- Location
- West Yorks
i feel certain that there will be warm welcome upon arrival!
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i feel certain that there will be warm welcome upon arrival!
gbb
Squire
- Location
- Peterborough
Two vintage fighters, turned out one was the BBMF Hurricane, the other, despite flying 'alongside' wasn't showing on adsb. Conningsby to Bedfordshire, over Peterborough, onto Boston ish then probably back to Conninsby.
Reasonable to assume the other fighter , while not sshowing on adsb, would have been a Spitfire.
While I didn't see or hear it, you can see PA474 Lancaster was over March at the same time, not far from here. I assume they split at some stage....
Reasonable to assume the other fighter , while not sshowing on adsb, would have been a Spitfire.
While I didn't see or hear it, you can see PA474 Lancaster was over March at the same time, not far from here. I assume they split at some stage....
Jenkins
Legendary Member
- Location
- Felixstowe
DaveReading
Don't suffer fools gladly (must try harder!)
- Location
- Reading, obvs
slowmotion
Quite dreadful
- Location
- lost somewhere
We went to a remote floating camp on Knight's Inlet, British Columbia last week. A 69 year old Dehavilland Otter DHC-3 float plane took us there. It carries twelve passengers with one sitting in the co-pilot's seat. They stash your luggage in one of the floats. Great fun.
Attachments
DaveReading
Don't suffer fools gladly (must try harder!)
- Location
- Reading, obvs
One of a number of turboprop conversions of the original piston-engined DHC Otter.
gbb
Squire
- Location
- Peterborough
I always thought flying in a 'small' aircraft is something most of us never will do but would be great fun (and sometimes a bit scary too)
A handful of colleagues and myself used to travel to various global locations and one of them was in Paysandu (sp) near the Uruguay/Argentine border. She related later how they took a small single engine aircraft to fly out to a farm up country...as it took off, she said all you could see was this ever increasingly close tree line on the end of the runway they had to take off over...it was a fairly white knuckle ride for someone who's never experienced it apparently
a.twiddler
Veteran
A PBY Catalina flew low over the house a short time ago heading North. it's just south of Wigan at the moment. Just caught a glimpse of it as it flew away.
Later.
According to Flightradar it originated from Duxford and has now landed near Fleetwood.
Later.
According to Flightradar it originated from Duxford and has now landed near Fleetwood.
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gbb
Squire
- Location
- Peterborough
Having been to a flying evening at Duxford, it immediately struck me how some aircraft are throbbing and oozing power, you can feel it, you can hear if.
But some are surprisingly graceful, the Catalina was one of them. Ironically, so was the B17. The Catalina just seemed to hang in the air almost effortlessly.
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Punkawallah
Veteran
Of our se it does - it’s dangling below that bloody great wing, innit?
:-)
:-)
a.twiddler
Veteran
It's a curious thing that as far as I know all the surviving Catalinas are the amphibious versions, leading people to believe that they were all designed like that, yet most of the versions used by the RAF and associated air forces during WW2 were true flying boats with no landing gear. This meant that to be able to beach them or bring them on land for maintenance the beaching gear had to be attached so they could be hauled out of the water.
Presumably for most of their operational lives they were moored in more or less salty water. Salt water + aluminium, not a good recipe for a long and happy life, and they were worked hard, with constant long patrols.
My father, who spent the war in Ceylon working on Catalinas after narrowly avoiding arriving in Singapore just as it fell to the Japanese, would tell me how they had to do all possible work on them while moored in a shallow lagoon, which meant getting on a boat. Some airmen would tie tools to themselves with string as if they dropped a crucial spanner into the lagoon they would get a proper bawling out from their NCOs. From time to time the best swimmers would be detailed to dive in and retrieve all these tools that had plopped into the lagoon.
A job that had to be done after each landing was to get aboard with a pocket full of tiny corks and look for any popped rivets in the hull, which could occur with a bumpy landing, and plug the holes. I imagine that they would all be re riveted when that aircraft came ashore for other major work.
The first time that my father and his fellow airmen there saw an amphibious PBY 5A it was a bit dramatic. They were used to seeing flying boats come and go on the lagoon but this one came round heading for the small airstrip. Expecting a terrible pile up some of them ran to the runway, wondering if it had sustained some damage that meant it couldn't land on the water. Miraculously, it sprouted wheels and came to a smooth landing. It aroused a lot of interest. They speculated that replacement Catalinas might all be like that. Apparently not.
The Americans were having enough problems of their own in the Pacific, so despite lend lease and all that, their most up to date aircraft were going to their own forces. Of course nobody knew that at the time, and information about anything was very limited. Most British servicemen in that area were more worried about a possible Japanese invasion of Ceylon as a stepping stone to British India after the catastrophic fall of Singapore and the loss of Malaya. It's hard to comprehend today how much of a blow the loss of the previously believed-to-be-impregnable fortress of Singapore was to the British psyche, and along with it the mythology of Western invincibility. What next? The Rock of Gibraltar, another near mythological icon dear to the British self image?
Anyhow, the Catalinas continued doing their thing until the end of the war.
There was a major cull of the non amphibious Catalinas after WW2 as the need for flying boats diminished, and the amphibious versions proved more versatile, with all the concrete airstrips that were built during and after the war.
Presumably for most of their operational lives they were moored in more or less salty water. Salt water + aluminium, not a good recipe for a long and happy life, and they were worked hard, with constant long patrols.
My father, who spent the war in Ceylon working on Catalinas after narrowly avoiding arriving in Singapore just as it fell to the Japanese, would tell me how they had to do all possible work on them while moored in a shallow lagoon, which meant getting on a boat. Some airmen would tie tools to themselves with string as if they dropped a crucial spanner into the lagoon they would get a proper bawling out from their NCOs. From time to time the best swimmers would be detailed to dive in and retrieve all these tools that had plopped into the lagoon.
A job that had to be done after each landing was to get aboard with a pocket full of tiny corks and look for any popped rivets in the hull, which could occur with a bumpy landing, and plug the holes. I imagine that they would all be re riveted when that aircraft came ashore for other major work.
The first time that my father and his fellow airmen there saw an amphibious PBY 5A it was a bit dramatic. They were used to seeing flying boats come and go on the lagoon but this one came round heading for the small airstrip. Expecting a terrible pile up some of them ran to the runway, wondering if it had sustained some damage that meant it couldn't land on the water. Miraculously, it sprouted wheels and came to a smooth landing. It aroused a lot of interest. They speculated that replacement Catalinas might all be like that. Apparently not.
The Americans were having enough problems of their own in the Pacific, so despite lend lease and all that, their most up to date aircraft were going to their own forces. Of course nobody knew that at the time, and information about anything was very limited. Most British servicemen in that area were more worried about a possible Japanese invasion of Ceylon as a stepping stone to British India after the catastrophic fall of Singapore and the loss of Malaya. It's hard to comprehend today how much of a blow the loss of the previously believed-to-be-impregnable fortress of Singapore was to the British psyche, and along with it the mythology of Western invincibility. What next? The Rock of Gibraltar, another near mythological icon dear to the British self image?
Anyhow, the Catalinas continued doing their thing until the end of the war.
There was a major cull of the non amphibious Catalinas after WW2 as the need for flying boats diminished, and the amphibious versions proved more versatile, with all the concrete airstrips that were built during and after the war.
gbb
Squire
- Location
- Peterborough
Jameshow
Guru
I always thought flying in a 'small' aircraft is something most of us never will do but would be great fun (and sometimes a bit scary too)
A handful of colleagues and myself used to travel to various global locations and one of them was in Paysandu (sp) near the Uruguay/Argentine border. She related later how they took a small single engine aircraft to fly out to a farm up country...as it took off, she said all you could see was this ever increasingly close tree line on the end of the runway they had to take off over...it was a fairly white knuckle ride for someone who's never experienced it apparently
Ex and I flew from Birgunj Nepal up to Kathmandu in a light aircraft great fun flying through the mountains!
DaveReading
Don't suffer fools gladly (must try harder!)
- Location
- Reading, obvs
Not quite.
The Smithsonian's Catalina, currently on loan to the National Naval Aviation Museum at Pensacola, is a non-amphibian PBY-5 (the only surviving one).
Incidentally, the Duxford example, "Miss Pick Up", is actually a Canso (built by Canadian Vickers), although it masquerades as a USAAF Catalina.
