Since nobody has mentioned it, I wanted to add the Beriev Be-200 to the list of modern, current-production seaplanes. It fulfills a similar mission profile to the aforementioned Canadair CL-415.
Very cool.
Barring accidents, it’s the former. But …
By the time they get that old, it wouldn’t be surprising that one entire wing or tail plane is a repaired unit from some other aircraft which was parted out after an accident. e.g. two airplanes ground-loop, one trashing the left wing, the other the right wing. The better fuselage & tail survives to fly another day with the undamaged wing from the worse-off plane, and the rest of that worse-off plane turns into parts.
Engines are removed & replaced as units often enough that it’s vanishingly unlikely either engine on an old airplane is the original engine serial number it left the factory with.
Legally you can rebuilt the entire airplane from scratch around an intact certification placard, and still call it the same certified aircraft. For some rare and desirable aircraft, this is worth doing as a labor of love…not cost effective as a commercial venture.
Recall the Story of Paul Bunyan’s Axe: he still has the same axe he first ever used for logging, he’s just replaced the head 3 times and the handle 5 times…
IIRC, if it is a production certified aircraft, then the repairs have to be the same as the original design; or the change has to be certified, aircraft-certified materials and hardware, etc. The work at the very least has to be checked and signed off by an aircraft mechanic certified to work on that aircraft.
OTOH, if you do the paperwork to convert the aircraft to “experimental” category, you can make whatever modifications you like (provided you demonstrate their suitability/airworthiness to the FAA) but experimental category aircraft cannot be used as commercial aircraft.
Sorry about the typo. That should have been Lycoming O360.
Like “Chefguy,” I grew up taking flights to places like Ketchikan and Petersburg in the old Grumman Goose, both operated by Alaska Coastal Airlines and Ellis airlines. They also had PBYs which I flew in as a highschool runner going to track meets.
All were great fun to take off and land in, but the noisiest damn things I’ve ever flown in. You either had to have a strong yelling voice or you learned creative sign language. My uncle once wrote the word “Taku” backwards in the air from two seats behind to tell me the name of the inlet we were passing (and thus close to arrival at home).
You could sit up next to the pilot and watch while he ate his bag lunch, and, as a boy, one even offered to teach me how to fly the plane. I was told Coastal used a surplus stock of old WW II engines, workmanlike but unrefined, and when one went bad they just took it out and put in another while the stock lasted. That was local lore, in any event. They later upgraded to what I recall as some kind of turbo prop. Both seaplane companies eventually went out of business, merging with Alaska Airlines before being phased out, probably due largely to the ferry system.
I got violently bounced all over the sky in a PBY on the way to Sitka once as a teen, and that’s the most scared I’ve ever been in an aircraft. You’d be swaying from side to side as in a cradle, then suddenly pushed up hard for about 5 seconds, then the bottom dropped out for a few hundred feet. The wings were flexing madly. They’d had a well-publicized fatal crash of a PBY the week before landing on a lake. They recovered the pilot’s foot. Ahh, Alaska aviation.
The Russians have jet powered amphibians they use routinely today, big, passenger models, I mean. These land on the water and taxi up onto a concrete apron and landing stage just like the Goose and PBY did. They are used often by the Russian emergency services paramilitary force as water bombers for forest fires. You can find photos of several models online–sorry I didn’t get them for you before I started to write this.
Here, try this:
http://www.beriev.com/eng/core_e.html
Click on “aircraft”.
I didn’t notice whether anyone else has already referred you to this site.
…and here is an Alaska Coastal plane in flight (if the web address will come up).
Scroll down a bit to find the story on Alaska Coastal Airlines. Click on the image of the goose, and you get a fine, large size image. Very nice.
Wanted to point out that saying that flying boats were so popular in the early days because there weren’t many airports is kind of a chicken/egg thing. There weren’t many airports because there weren’t many large, non-flying boat aircraft.
Way back when if you wanted to build an airplane of size your only choice for quite awhile was to build a flying boat. An extremely heavy aircraft will require an extremely strong landing gear. So strong in fact that in the early days it was simply impossible to build any such landing gear without adding much too much weight to the airframe. Plus, until they could also make very complicated, retractable landing gear, it would add way too much drag as well.
A large, smooth boat’s hull & a water landing was not only a simple solution, but for a long time it was the only solution!
I’m puzzled by this. If you can build a large aircraft of sufficient strength, designing landing gear for it is no big deal. Landing gear “scales” rather readily - you add wheels and axles.
Large land-based aircraft go back to the early days of fixed-wing aviation. Here’s one that first flew in 1917.
The issue isn’t so much the gear itself as where the gear attaches to the fuselage. 100% of the weight of the aircraft sits on those points. Back when all this was wood, there wasn;t a way to make it stout enough without getting stupid heavy.
Also, the gear needs to be able to absorb about 1.5x the static weight of the vehicle to account for the impact forces of a non-perfect landing.
The same overload issue applies when “scaling out” by putting a bunch of wheels & gear legs along the bottom to spread the load. That’s fine until you touch down in a nose-up attitude and 100% of the impact forcces are absorbed by the last 1 or 2 sets of legs while the other 3-x sets of legs are still up in the air. If your aircraft was real wide (e.g. a straight flying wing design) then this might not be an issue. But then you’ll need a landing strip & taxiways as wide as the gear track.
Well, the main spar of the wing must be capable of carrying something like 300% of the weight of the aircraft - and these were successfully made of wood without being excessively heavy.
And note that the gear need not necessarily attach to the fuselage: link.
Surprised no one mentioned the Ekranoplan (aka the Caspian Sea Monster). Not exactly a plane it used ground-effect to fly a few feet above water.
It never made it into regular service that I am aware of but pretty sure other ground-effect aircraft have been designed.
All that is certainly true, LSLGuy, but it is certainly not true to say (as Hail Ants did) that a flying boat was the “only” option for large aircraft early on. Counter-examples to that statement include the Farman F.60 Goliath, 60 of which were built and which was larger and heaver than many contemporary flying boats.
Ok, so that was early on, right after WWI, in fact. What about a little later, maybe flying boats scaled better as engines got stronger. One of the largest passenger-carrying flying boats in revenue service was the Sikorsky VS-44. With a gross take-off weight of 57,500lbs, it was larger than the famous Clippers or Empire-class flying boats and could carry 40 passengers across the Atlantic non-stop in absolute luxury. Certainly more impressive than a DC-3, admittedly. The DC-4, however, was a contemporary (although we tend to think of it as a 50’s aircraft, it actually flew before the war). It had a loaded weight of 63,500lbs and carried up to 86 passengers farther and faster than the Sikorsky.
So both at the very beginning of the inter-war period and at the very end there were land-based aircraft that were the equals of flying boats in size and carrying capacity. Weight alone was not a determining factor in choosing a flying boat design over a land-based one. As usual with aircraft design, the choice involved an interplay of various factors.
This may be on interest (Boeing 314 inaugural flight)
http://www.aircraftowner.com/videos/view/boeing-314-yankee-clipper-nc18603_2444.html?m=1
Brian
What’s the difference between a “flying boat” and a sea plane?
There are (at least) two different ways to use a plane on water.
One is with pontoons - basically replace the wheels with two floating units.
This is often called a floatplane.
The other is to make the hull boat shaped, so it floats. Often there are two small floating things on the wings (called sponsons) - these don’t provide much floatation - they keep the plane from tipping over.
The later type is called a flying boat.
Seaplane could refer to either, but can also mean “floatplane”
Brian
(it is also possible to have one pontoon and to sponsons - but that isn’t common)
…Such as the Grumman JFand J2FDuck or the Vought OS2U Kingfisher.
*Now, I’m too young to die in a lousy PBY
That’s for the eager, not for me
I don’t trust in my luck, to be picked up by a Duck
After I’ve crashed into the sea
Yes, I’d rather be a bellhop
Than I flyer on a flattop
With my hand around a bottle
You can keep your God damned throttle, buster
I wanted wings, 'til I got the God damned things
Now, I don’t want them anymore…*