By Warwick Abadee 

Flying boats occupy a special place in Australian maritime and aviation history and in the general public’s imagination. Warwick Abadee writes about an enduring infatuation.

My interest in flying ‘seabirds’ was kindled in childhood at Rose Bay in Sydney, where these aircraft - at the height of their fame - were a grand feature of the harbour. A close cousin’s experience in WWII with the famous RAAF No 10 Squadron’s Sutherland flying boats in England further stimulated my fascination about this golden period when aircraft operated on water, harnessing human ingenuity and skills. Flying boats, seaplanes, amphibians, floatplanes: the evocative names conjure a special chapter in aviation history. Their time was brief though glorious.

How long might seafarers have mused about flying like the albatross and other seabirds? An early proponent was a 17th Century Jesuit priest called Francesco de Lana Terzi who conceived of a boat which could be airbourne when four supporting globes of copper were emptied of air. The concept, imaginative though it was, obviously never left the ground (or water) but this scientific approach has been seen as paving the way for the hot-air balloons of two centuries later.

The race to build a heavier-than-air flying boat began in the year the Wright brother first flew, 1903, when another American aircraft, the Langley ‘Aerodrome’, crashed attempting a takeoff on the Potomac River.

In 1910, a Frenchman in a flimsy floatplane powered by a pusher engine took off from a harbour near Marseilles and became the world’s first successful seaplane. The following year, Glenn Curtiss, an American aviator, succeeded with two back-to-back flights in San Diego in a seaplane that was to become the US Navy’s first aircraft.

Advances in design in France and the US impressed Britain’s Royal Naval Air Service Leading to their acquisition of the first of many seaplanes, the Bat Boat of 1914, strongly supported by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. The Bat Boat was a beautiful mahogany craft designed by Thomas Sopwith and manufactured by a boatbuilder in Cowes, UK. In a series of experiments over land, a person sitting beside the pilot with a bag of potatoes on his lap dropped them one at a time, as a simulated test of a bomb’s accuracy!

Just before the outbreak of WW1, Curtiss started building a large flying boat with a 22.5-m wingspan. He called it America and intended it to cross the Atlantic. However, the project was deferred. War had commenced, and with it came more urgent priorities. During the ensuing four years, warring countries made considerable progress with several types of flying boats. Floatplanes were found capable of performing operations that land-based aircraft of the time were unable to do as effectively.

After hostilities ceased, nations and manufacturers vigorously pursued commercial opportunities. The Atlantic presented the foremost challenge and in 1919 a US Navy Curtis NC 4 flying boat finally made the crossing, in 12 days (with various stops) from Newfoundland to Plymouth. The crossing demonstrated that the flying boat was safe for over-water operations.

The 1920’s and 1930’s saw new designs of both commercial and military seaplanes evolving from the earlier craft built of wood and fabric. The RAF and RAAF purchased seaplanes with such exotic names as Supermarine Seagull V and Wacket Widgeon 2. Australian navy ships such as the ill-fated cruiser HMAS Sydney (2) launched Seagulls from onboard catapults. The Singapore biplanes manufactured by Short Bros in the UK in 1926 were considered the best military flying boats of their time and, in 1941, three of them would comprise the entire air defence of Fiji.

This postwar period marked the start of the era of truly magnificent giant flying boats, which lasted into the 1970s. In the USA, Boeing built Pan AM the Yankee Clipper. In the UK, Short Bros produced their 1930s C Class Empire flying boats – for example the Cooee, Coogee, Carpentaria, Corio, Coorong and Coolangatta – for Qantas and other airlines. They were the first four-engined, all-metal, monoplane amphibians.

The giant German Dornier Do X was even more impressive.  Built in 1929, it had twelve 600-hp Curtiss Conquerer engines mounted back-to-back over the wings, and was designed to carry 100 passengers over the Atlantic at 185 km/h. Weighing 28,000kg and fitted with sleeping cabins, smoking and dining rooms and other ‘lifestyle’ features, it was astonishing for its time. However, it was fated for a short life because of high operating costs.

Developments in the 1930s enabled large flying boats to open new routes worldwide, flying longer distances without refuelling. On 5th July 1938, the C Class Cooee left Rose Bay on the first scheduled commercial flight to Southampton. The service was to offer three departures a week and (remarkably for the time) a duration of nine and a half days, with 31 stops. Thirty two passengers were carried in luxury, even enjoying one-hole mini-golf. On at least one recorded occasion the first officer, who set up the game, called to his captain, “hold the aircraft steady, we’re putting!”

But war clouds were again approaching. Before long, these superb aircraft were pressed into military service and Qantas pilots were carrying out dangerous, lifesaving wartime missions, alongside the famously adaptable American Catalina amphibian warplanes. In early 1942, when Darwin and North Western Australia were attacked, several Qantas flying boats and RAAF Catalinas with Qantas pilots escaped damage. Others less fortunate were either sunk at their moorings or downed by the Japanese, sometimes without trace.

The remarkable Catalina, in the latter part of the war, was solely responsible for maintaining direct air contact with the UK. It was the only aircraft that could bypass occupied South-East Asia and make the non-stop flight from Perth’s Swan River to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where their vital mail and VIP passengers were transferred to British flights. The stripped-down Catalinas left before dawn and flew for about 28 hours, in radio silence. Their passengers were given a commemorative certificate, ‘The Secret Order of the Double Sunrise’.

After the war, many surplus Catalinas were simply scuttled at sea. Some ended their days as houseboats. Bizarrely, one found a home for a few years in the NSW Blue Mountains town of Katoomba, floating on a man-made lake in the appropriately named Catalina Park.

Film tycoon Howard Hughes made history in 1947 when his 97.5-metre (320ft) wingspan, eight-engined wooden Hercules (better known as the Spruce Goose), made a one-mile flight at Long Beach California at just 30 feet altitude. This mammoth which, amazingly, could carry a 60-ton tank or 700 troops, ended up in a museum which I had the opportunity some years ago to inspect. It remains to this day the world’s largest aircraft.

In post-war Australia the large luxury flying boats continued to operate to and from the UK and around Oceania. In 1951 the government arranged for an exploratory flight in a Catalina Frigate Bird II from Rose Bay to Chile and back. Captained then by the famous aviator, P G (later Sir Gordon) Taylor, this WWII workhorse is permanently on display at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum.

Flying boats operated on regional ‘cruises’ too, such as fishing trips to Lake Eucumbene in the NSW Snowy Mountains. Ansett Airline’s flights from Sydney to Lord Howe Island on Sandringhams (converted RNZAF WWII Sunderlands) are legendary. These flights, which live in many peoples’ memories, continued until 1974.

The big flying boats dominated the long-haul routes for a few decades, at a time when there were simply too few adequate land airstrips for the frequent fuel stops that were then required. But, as aviation facilities spread and long-range passenger planes developed, they were superseded. At Sydney’s Rose Bay – once an international terminal where so many ‘seabirds’ once rested at anchor, on the slipway or in the huge hangar – there’s just a small single-engined seaplane tourist operation. The modest commemorative plaque and the plinth which stand there today remind me of the joy of having lived through much of a memorable, virtually vanished era – the time of the great ‘aviation yachts’.