ANY flying boat you come across nowadays is likely to be in a museum, yet these amphibious aircraft, which use their fuselage to provide buoyancy, once had a golden age. In the 1930s they were luxurious civil airliners, lake- and sea-hopping through the British empire with well-heeled tourists on board. In the 1940s, during the second world war, they took on a military role, ferrying large numbers of troops over long distances, hunting and destroying submarines, and rescuing pilots who had ditched.
Flying boats fell out of fashion because of one of the consequences of that war. Many of the concrete runways it caused to be built were then pressed into civilian use. Flying boats’ killer app, their lack of need for such runways, thus disappeared. The Saunders-Roe Princess, the last British version, was the largest all-metal flying boat made (it was similar in size to a Boeing 747). But it was cancelled in the early 1950s, after only three had been built.
There have been attempts to revive them, not least in Britain, where researchers at Imperial College, in London, have come up with a design that blends wing and body, and uses modern, composite...Continue reading
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