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1935 was a very peaceful year: Amelia Earhart made the first flight alone from Hawaii to California, Europa was making colonial agreements, Japan was busy "administrating" China (against Ho-Chi-Ming and Chernault's Flying Tigers, but this is another history), the airspeed record was set at 352 mph. Only Adolf Hitler, who wanted to rearm Germany, was a bit of worry, but Great Britain quickly solved the problem giving him permission to build a German navy. The Americans were sure that everything was right, but, just in case, this was the year of the first flight of the Consolidated PBY Catalina.
The flying boat was revolutionary for its age. It had a parasol wing, with two support struts by each side. Stabilizing floats, retractable in flight to form streamlined wingtips, were another aerodynamic innovation. The two-step hull design was similar to that of the P2Y, but the Model 28 had a cantilever cruciform tail unit instead of a strut-braced twin tail. Cleaner aerodynamics gave the Model 28 better performance than earlier designs. Its main mission was patroling, but it could be equipped with depth charges, bombs, torpedoes, and .50 calibre Browning machine guns. It did not need to be fast (196 mph), but needed long range: 2520 miles.
PBYs served with every branch of the US military and in the air forces and navies of many other nations. The PBY was originally designed to be a patrol bomber, an aircraft with a long operational range intended to locate and attack enemy transport ships at sea in order to compromise enemy supply lines. With a mind to a potential conflict in the Pacific Ocean, where troops would require resupply over great distances, the U.S. Navy in the 1930s invested millions of dollars in developing long-range flying boats for this purpose. Flying boats had the advantage of not requiring runways, in effect having the entire ocean available. Several different flying boats were adopted by the Navy, but the PBY was the most widely used and produced. After so many years, it's easy to forget that the original PBY was not an amphibian but a flying boat, without wheels. It was necessary to wait until the development of the PBY-5A to have the definitive, amphibian plane. Even later, the PBY-5B was a flying boat again.
In World War II, PBYs were used in anti-submarine warfare, patrol bombing, convoy escorts, search-and-rescue missions, and cargo transport. The PBY was the most successful aircraft of its kind; no other flying boat was produced in greater numbers. The last active military PBYs were not retired from service until the 1980s. Even today, over seventy years after its first flight, the aircraft continues to fly as an airtanker in aerial firefighting operations all over the world, and there are discussion groups in internet about preservation, restoration and handling of the real Cats.
Looking in the FlightSim.Com library, I found that Alphasim, Abacus and Aerosoft had made payware versions of this wonderful plane. Mike Stone made the only and universal freeware model for FS2004 (SPBY5A.ZIP), with later improvements made by other flightsimmers (like a version for FSX made by D.L. Talbot, DLTPBYF1.ZIP) and many, many repaints, including mine (PBY5AH66.ZIP, PBY5AH58.ZIP, PBY5AH19.ZIP and PBY5AH18.ZIP). The second one is based in a plane operated by Buffalo Air. In 2001 this aircraft flipped over while taking on water from a lake near Inuvik, NWT. I received an email telling me that the plane was recovered from the lake and it was being restored. There is some information about the plane in this page. Sadly, I lost the email adress of the flightsimmer who informed me about the restoration, so I have no new information about the actual state of the Cat. If he wants to write me again, I'll be glad.
Searching a bit more in the FlightSim.Com and another flight simulator sites, I found an alarming lack of flying boats and amphibians in our virtual universe. There are no freeware of the Saro Londons, Supermarine Stranraers, and only one (with upgrades for FSX) of the Do-18, Do-24, Supermarine Walrus, H6K Mavis and Boeing 314. There is a good quantity of Short Sunderlands and Sikorsky S-42, but nothing more. I have the feeling that there are too few flight simulator modelers in the world, so if someone wants to be a real hero, please start to make these forgotten ones.
In the initials PBY, "PB" stands for "Patrol Bomber" and "Y" is the code for "Consolidated Aircraft", as designated in the U.S. Navy aircraft designation system of 1922. For this article, we will use the already mentioned cfnje, sunken and refloated. There is an operation manual in each one of my repaints, so we will follow it. The startup position I selected was Inuvik, just a few meters where it crashed. By the way, you don't have to be a bad pilot to sink an amphibian: even a son of Jacques Cousteau did. But you must be a very lucky man to leave alive. Why? well, a very very fast ship used to sail at 30 knots maximun speed, let's say 45 mph.. The Cat must be at 70 mph to liftoff. A ship has a skin of half of an inch of steel. The Cat has some millimeters of aluminium. The ship can have double hull, with many compartments. The Cat... just one. If the ship runs aground, it stops. If the Cat runs aground, it plunges the nose in the water and finishes upside down, the pilots still in their seats, water rushing by the windows.
But we, of course, don't have this problem. So, turn around the plane, drive to the lake, go in, raise the wheels, lower the floats and push the throttles to full. There are no flaps. The aircraft will NOT take itself off so that when elevator control is obtained lift the nose clear off the water. Once airborne, retract the floats. Max. float operating speed is 130 knots, and max gear operating speed is 122 knots.
Mike Stone is a retired Boeing employee, who found the right combination of low disk space and model detail in his creations. The final PBY-5A Catalina that he released has two models, one with armament and another with the guns and observation points removed, as many civilian post-war planes really do. The struts, glass and surfaces are well modeled, the wheels, ailerons and elevons move right and the sound is attached to the default DC-3. Mike Stone made a model easy to fly, and very near to the original one's reactions. Slow to react, the plane can be put in any position until 60 degrees of banking and it will stay here. It can withstand 3 Gs, very good for a patrolling bird. At high speeds the controls become heavy. The plane doesn't stall, just drops the nose, with all controls remaining effective. When you slow the engines, the nose goes up, and when you go fast, it goes down. This is due to the upper position of the engines, and is a good detail in the flying envelope of this simulation.
Real Performance:
The simulation takeoff speed on water is 75 mph, the max flying speed is 192 mph, 4 mph slower than the official one, but the difference is so minimal that it can be forgotten.
The panel is very schematic, the only point I don't like of Mike's artworks, but I hope that someday somebody will release a decent panel for the PBY. There is no virtual cockpit. It increases the simulation speed and it's still a good point of discussion if it is indispensable to have a VC in an FS2004 or FSX model. The handling has no tricks, no dangerous places: the PBY wasn't authorized to do any kind of aerobatic manoeuvres and I think that it was because it lacked the capability to do any. It couldn't stall, but the spin was possible with one engine inoperative. Even so, straightening the controls was enough to stop the spin... before all the crew will finish stamped over the walls by the G-forces.
The landing must be made slowly and carefully: there are no flaps, no air brakes, and you must double check that the landing gear is down if you land on the ground or the gear is UP if you land on the water. Why? Well, if the nose wheel is down, the water at 70 mph crashes with the rear panel of the nose wheel compartment, breaks the aluminium wall, rushes inside the plane, it starts to sink... or worse, the main gear brakes the plane, it capsizes, upside down, the seabelts, water by the windows, Titanic without Kate Winslet and without the car scene... bla bla bla.
With 4000 planes made, many of them still flying after 60 years of service, there are plenty of possibilities to make repaints of this plane. In the United States Army Air Forces and later in the USAF their designation was the OA-10, while Canadian-built PBYs were known as Cansos.
The PBY served with distinction and played a prominent and invaluable role in the war against the Japanese and the Germans. This was especially true during the first year of the war in the Pacific, because the PBY and the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress were the only two available aircraft with the range necessary. They played too a very important role in the sinking of the Bismarck, and in the Indian Ocean, flying from the Seychelles. Their duties included escorting convoys to Murmansk. Several squadrons of PBY-5As and -6As in the Pacific theater were specially modified to operate as night convoy raiders. Outfitted with state-of-the-art magnetic anomaly detection gear and painted flat black, these "Black Cats" attacked Japanese supply convoys at night. Catalinas were surprisingly successful in this highly unorthodox role. Between August 1943 and January 1944, Black Cat squadrons had sunk 112,700 tons of merchant shipping, damaged 47,000 tons, and damaged ten Japanese warships.
PBYs were also used for commercial air travel. Still the longest commercial flights (in terms of time aloft) ever made in aviation history were the Qantas flights flown weekly from 29 June 1943 through July 1945 over the Indian Ocean. To thumb their nose at the Japanese (who controlled the area), Qantas offered non-stop service between Perth and Colombo, a distance of 3,592 nm (5,652 km). As the PBY typically cruised at 110 knots, this took from 28-32 hours and was called the "flight of the double sunrise", since the passengers saw two sunrises during their non-stop journey. The flight was made with radio silence (because of the possibility of Japanese attack) and had a maximum payload of 1000 lbs or three passengers plus 65 kg of armed forces and diplomatic mail. I made a repaint of one of the this planes, belonging to TAA. Trans Australian Airlines was a Qantas subsidiary that took charge of the New Guinea flights during the WWII. Two PBY-5A Catalinas were used until July 24th, 1958. The undercarriage and hydraulics were removed to increase payload.
Alejandro Hurtado
dracosist@cantv.net
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