Solent, please. It’s named after the body of water between England and the Isle of Wight, not a fictional food.
Check out the Sunderland at the RAF Museum in Hendon, London if you ever get over there.
:smack: I wondered why I was getting all those non-aircraft hit in my google search.
Getting sort of back on topic for those who didn’t follow the link, the ***Solent ***had a range of 1,800 miles (1,565 naut mi, 2,900 km)
Good post. Sounds like overall the OP’s vid can be dismissed as a work of a know-nothing.
Ref the snip above, your second link is not a TA-600/AG-600. IMO it’s actually one of these: Harbin SH-5 - Wikipedia
There’s another Short Solent at the Museum of Transport and Technology (MOTAT) in Auckland, New Zealand.
It’s been fully restored but can’t fly, sadly. Oh, how I wish someone would start another flying-boat airline!
All of the Martin M-130’s are long gone, too.
To get some idea of what the old flying boats were like, the fastest and most luxurious way to cross in the old days, you can also visit the Sikorsky VS-44A *Excambian *at the New England Air Museum at Hartford-Bradley Airport. They don’t let people inside, though.
There are two Martin JRM Mars surviving out of the seven built. As for the others, one was scrapped in 1945, one sank and was disposed of as scrap, one crashed fighting a forest fire in 1961, and one was destroyed by an engine fire and sank in 1950. One other Mars was damaged beyond repair in a typhoon in 1962 and was broken up for spares. Of the survivors, one is supposed to go to the National Naval Aviation Museum at NAS Pensacola, and one is apparently still airworthy (it fought fires in 2013 and 2015).
Hawaii Mars was pretty much the highlight of AirVenture '16 (better known to some as “Oshkosh”). I would’ve given an awful lot to have been there to see her.
Philippine Mars has been repainted to her period-correct US Navy paint scheme for a couple/few years now, at Coulson’s expense. Last I heard/read, the bureaucratic requirements of transferring the aircraft to NNAM is an ongoing problem, along with figuring out who’s going to pay for the ferry flight from British Columbia to Pensacola.