Just five years after Alcock and Brown crossed the Atlantic in a wood and fabric biplane, new designs, such as the Dutch Fokker F.VII and the similar, all-metal Ford Trimotor, made their aircraft look like a relic from a bygone age. The new models were monoplanes capable of carrying ten passengers in the relative comfort of an enclosed cockpit. It seemed clear that they represented the future of commercial air transport. By the early 1930s American manufacturers were beginning work on designs such as the Boeing 247 and Douglas DC-2, the former usually recognized as the first genuinely modern airliner. Streamlined and sleek, these two aircraft were capable of carrying passengers at speeds of 200 mph.
Such sophisticated designs made the decision by Imperial Airways of London to order eight 100-mph Handley-Page HP.42 biplanes seem extraordinarily reactionary. But there was method in their madness.
Rapid technological advances made bigger, heavier, and faster airliners possible, but a by-product of this was that landing speeds also increased. Higher landing speeds required longer, smoother runways, but in 1928, when Imperial issued their specifications for the HP.42, there wasn’t a single paved runway in the world. Added to that, Imperial served India, Africa, and the Middle East, and were often operating from scrub that had barely been cleared of stones and goats. Flying from rough strips across the British Empire, Imperial Airways simply wasn’t able to take advantage of the latest technology. The solution was to take to the water.
A flying boat, minus wheels and with a fuselage shaped like the hull of a speedboat, can land and take off on any stretch of smooth water. If they opted for flying boats, Imperial (and their American counterpart Pan Am, who flew to South America and had designs on longer transoceanic Pacific routes) could build aircraft that were more than a match for the land-based alternatives.
In 1936 Imperial Airways put the beautiful four-engined C-Class Empire flying boat into service. Luxuriously appointed for just twenty-four passengers, the Empire had been built by Short Brothers without first constructing a prototype, but it conformed to the old belief that if it looked right, it was right. Capable of 200 mph, it was the fastest flying boat in the world. Each of the elegant silver machines was given a name beginning with C, such as Calypso, Caribou, Canopus, and Cleopatra.
Billed by Imperial Airways as “the most luxurious flying boats in the world,” everything about Empire-class service evoked glamour, comfort, and style.
On March 14, 1939, Corsair took off from Lake Victoria in east Africa bound for Juba, 350 miles away in southern Sudan. The journey was scheduled to take a couple of hours, but owing to a piece of faulty navigation equipment, the crew got thoroughly lost and were still flying around 4 hours after takeoff. With just 15 minutes of fuel left in the tanks, there was no option but to land where they could. In a piece of skillful flying, the flying boat’s captain—brother of Jack Alcock who, in 1919, had been first to fly nonstop across the Atlantic—put her down gently, only for a submerged rock to tear the hull. In danger of sinking, Alcock gunned the throttles and managed to beach Corsair in the thick mud at the side of the river. But which river? It transpired that they’d flown southwest and were in the Belgian Congo, miles from civilization. Nine months later, after a road, a dry dock, a dam, and an artificial lake had been built, the repaired Corsair was refloated and took off. She left in her wake Corsairville, a settlement built to house the Congolese workers employed to help salvage her.
Lacking really long range, the Empires were designed to leapfrog their way from one destination to the next as they flew from Southampton to Cape Town or Brisbane. This constraint posed a problem for Pan Am’s Martin M-130 flying boat on the California to Hawaii route, as there were few stops available. Even making it across the Pacific meant carrying no more than eight passengers. Pan Am built just three of these aircraft—China Clipper, Hawaiian Clipper, and Philippine Clipper—and while they undoubtedly won the airline prestige, they didn’t make it money. What’s more, the only commercial transatlantic service that had ever been operated, until the Hindenburg blew up in 1937, was by Germany’s Zeppelin airships.
The twelve Boeing 314 Clippers were the most glamorous aircraft of their day. At the outbreak of the Second World War they were the only aircraft capable of flying nonstop across the Atlantic. Both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill took advantage of this capability.
In an effort to address the problem of range, Pan Am and Imperial both conducted survey flights across the North Atlantic in 1936. While the Pan Am flying boat arrived at Foynes in southern Ireland with enough fuel to fly another 1,500 miles, the shorter-ranged Imperial C-Class craft had to carry extra fuel tanks just to make it to Newfoundland. By 1939, both airlines took delivery of new flying boats built specially to make the “water jump.”
Pan Am’s giant new Boeing 314 was the biggest airliner in service with any airline in the world, its wings so thick that the flight engineer could crawl through them and make adjustments to the four 1,600-horsepower engines in flight. The new Clippers carried twenty-two passengers, looked after by a twelve-man crew. There had never been—nor will there likely ever be again—a more luxurious commercial airline service. The big Clippers, with their distinctive triple tails and the Stars and Stripes emblazoned on the slab sides of their “hound-dog” nose, were instant icons.
The British machine, Short’s G-Class, flew for the first time in July 1939, less than a month after Pan Am’s Clippers had started carrying passengers across the Atlantic. It was a similarly impressive machine, just 5 feet shorter in length, but capable of the same speed and range. Recognizably a scaled-up version of the Empire boats, it could fly four times further. Imperial ordered three of them, the first of which, named Golden Hind, was delivered at the end of September. In every way, though, it was already too late.
With the outbreak of the Second World War earlier in the month, all three of Imperial’s new G-Class flying boats were requisitioned by the Air Ministry and pressed into service for maritime reconnaissance. But the war hastened the end of the big passenger-carrying flying boats more radically and permanently. The writing had been on the wall since 1938, when a new German airliner had flown nonstop from Berlin to New York. It wasn’t the range of the Focke-Wulf Fw-200 Condor that threatened the dominance of the British and American flying boats—it was more that she wasn’t a flying boat at all.
A machine out of time, the big, beautiful Saunders-Roe Princess overflies the 1953 Farnborough Air Show. The two Princess prototypes were eventually broken up and the cockpit of one of them was used, for a while, as an office at a scrap yard.
The ability to land on water meant long-range flying boats could travel more or less anywhere in the world and put down safely. But if the world were to be covered in runways, as happened during the war, landing on water no longer offered any kind of advantage. By the end of the war, Britain alone had spent £600 million, the equivalent of about £24 billion today, on airfield construction.
It took just a few years for the idea to sink in that there was simply no need for flying boats anymore. Post-1945 saw the emergence of designs that had been started before or during the war. They were often magnificent.
In the United States, billionaire Howard Hughes persevered with what was the largest aircraft ever built. The H-4 was known as the Spruce Goose because of its all-wooden construction (and because “spruce” rhymed with “goose,” while “birch,” which it was made of, didn’t). Hughes hauled the behemoth into the air in 1947 for less than a minute during what was supposed to be a taxi test. I’m pleased he got that incredible beast into the air.
Similarly, I’m happy that French manufacturer Latécoère, when asked to build a transatlantic flying boat in 1939, came up with the enormous, stunningly beautiful six-engined 631, despite the inconvenience of having been invaded. The first prototype was confiscated by Germany. The second 631 was built, dismantled, hidden around Toulouse for the remainder of the war, then assembled once the coast was clear. It flew in March 1945, and immediately after the war was the only French aircraft capable of carrying passengers across the Atlantic so, for reasons of national prestige, flew under the banner of Air France. A crash off Cameroon in 1955 prompted the final retirement of these wonderful-looking, but not entirely safe, machines.
It was the British who seemed most reluctant to let go of the flying boat. The Short Solent first flew in 1946. Although smaller than the 1939 G-Class, she was faster, and in 1948, BOAC’s small fleet of Solents took over the three-times-a-week service to Johannesburg. As the silver flying boats, Union flags painted on their tails, accelerated through the swell, it must have seemed to nostalgics that nothing had changed. But the last flight to South Africa was flown in November 1950.
As final as that appeared to be, it wasn’t quite the end of Britain’s love affair with the flying boat. One British manufacturer, Saunders-Roe, was proclaiming its own vision of the future that seemed reliant on the idea that Britain built wonderful flying boats, so the rest of the world had better get in step.
“Disembarkation into a small craft in choppy water is not a fitting end to a comfortable journey by flying boat,” claimed a Saunders-Roe advertisement. But instead of building an airliner with wheels to make use of all the new wartime runways, they proposed constructing a “waterdrome”—an airport terminal built around a huge artificial inland lake—and more flying boats. There was simply no telling them.
I’m glad they didn’t listen. If their predictions hadn’t been so completely wrong, they’d never have built the wonderful Princess. This ten-engined flying boat was genuinely unique, marrying two different generations of aircraft design that the rest of the world regarded as mutually exclusive. Second in size only to Howard Hughes’s record-breaking H-4, the Princess, even as she was being built, was a magnificent, anachronistic cul-de-sac.
Amazingly, that didn’t stop Saunders-Roe thinking about what might follow the Princess, and this took the shape of an elegant design for a six-engined jet flying boat they called the Duchess. She never left the drawing board.
But even that wasn’t the end of it. After the Princess was cancelled and the three airframes wrapped in weatherproof cocoons, like a dying millionaire cryogenically frozen in the hope of future revival by as yet undiscovered medical advances, the Saunders-Roe design team were still pitching ambitious new flying boat ideas. The most exotic of them—indeed, about as exotic an aircraft design as there’s ever been—was for a twenty-four-engined, V-tailed, four-deck flying boat designed to carry 1,000 passengers—that’s twice as many as today’s A380 Super Jumbo—for the cruise line P&O.
It’s easy to mock, but there’s something desperately sad about the way Saunders-Roe clung on to the dream. For barely ten years, most of which were disturbed by war, the big flying boats of Pan Am and Imperial Airways represented the very pinnacle of civil aviation. There was a never-to-be-repeated romance about them. The world is a better place for their brief, evocative existence, and in that assessment I include—maybe most of all—the lovely, doomed Saunders-Roe Princess.
