Today, we ask what ever became of flying boats. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
The problem of finding clear
space for takeoffs and landings dogged the first
would-be airplane inventors. Several people tried
to use water instead of land, even before the
Wright brothers. And the Wrights took off from a
pair of rails. The first person who actually flew
off water was Henri
Fabre. In 1910, he flew his flimsy seaplane for
a mile and a half in a harbor near Marseilles.
Three years later, the first commercial flying
service was begun with an early French seaplane.
Twice a day it made the twenty-mile flight between
Tampa and St. Petersburg in Florida. It could carry
only one passenger, and the cost of the trip was
five dollars.
Twenty years later, commercial flying boats were
the largest things in the sky. It felt safe to
cross water in a flying boat, and that's how they
were used. Pan American began service down to
Central America with a ten-passenger
Sikorsky S-38 seaplane in 1928. By 1934 it was
replaced with big flying boats like the Martin
M-130 which could carry forty people three thousand
miles.
Grandest of the successful flying boats was the
Boeing 314, nicknamed the Yankee
Clipper. Pan American used it between 1941
and '46. It had almost the wingspan of a 747 and
could carry seventy people over four thousand
miles.
Several truly enormous flying boats were built
after the Yankee Clipper, but they came at
the wrong time. Biggest of all was the
Hughes Hercules -- better known as the
"Spruce Goose." Its wingspan was half again that of
a 747, and it stood eighty feet high. It was meant
to carry seven hundred people. In 1947 Howard
Hughes flew it thirty feet into the air over Los
Angeles harbor. Then he put it away, and it's
been
maintained, unused, ever since, in mute and
perplexing testimony to Hughes' convoluted
thinking.
But Howard Hughes was nothing if not brilliant. He
probably just saw what was coming. When big
propeller-driven airliners, and then jets, came
into service after WW-II, seaplanes lost their
advantage. The land-based planes could now fly the
ocean. There was no longer anything to be gained by
using one kind of airplane over water and another
over land. Furthermore, seaplanes were inherently
large-bodied, high-winged machines -- not at all
suited to near-sonic speeds. Still, their large
bodies made them wonderfully spacious. The largest
had three-story interiors, and they looked not
unlike whales.
Small seaplanes can be found today in Canada and
Alaska, where lakes are a lot easier to find than
landing strips. But the big flying boats are gone.
All my life I've wanted just once to fly in one,
and now I don't know if any still exist. Only the
last of these wonderful old behemoths remains.
That's Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose, and it
represents a bittersweet misreading of where the
technology of flight was actually headed after
WW-II.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
Angelucci, E., World Encyclopedia of Civil
Aircraft. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1982,
Chapter 1.
Bilstein, R. E., Flight in America: From the
Wrights to the Astronauts. Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1984.
For more on the present storage of the Spruce Goose
see Episode
1722.
A surprising number of people responded to this
program with reminiscences and additional
information. John Marsh, for example, pointed to a
new article featuring two surviving Martin
Mars seaplanes, presently working as water
carriers for fighting forest fires (Air &
Space, Jan. 2001). Hunter Todd called to tell
of flying during the early 1990s in a surviving
Hawker Siddley flying boat, which was serving the
Virgin Islands.
My special thanks to listener Thomas Tella who
writes, "Please rejoice in knowing that at least four
other [great flying boats] remain: a Sikorsky S39B
Alaska and a Sikorsky VS44A
Excambian, both at the New England Air
Museum in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, and two
Martin Mars, Phillipine Mars and
Hawaii Mars both still in service as
fire-fighters in Port Alberni, British Columbia."
It is clear that I am not alone in looking back
upon those huge aeroplanes with great fondness.
This is a revised version of Episode 114.
The Pan American Clipper
clipart
Howard Hugh's Spruce Goose at the apogee of its
only flight
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-2000 by John H.
Lienhard.
