The Long Way Round...

I have known several PBY5 pilots and one Dornier pilot and their stories of ocean landings are scary. The Dornier pilot, a Dornier engineer, split the hull open in a hard water landing 90 deg into a wave from the ship Bremen's wake. A weak spot had been reported in the hull and as he said, "We found it." This was before the war and flight test in Germany was a bit less sophisticated then. The PBY guys said that ocean landings are made into the swells or waves, not in a trough, and the bounces are simply becoming airborne again but at fairly low speeds.

 

I was thinking of this, also.

 

That reminded me of the later 1956 incident where the Pan Am B377 Stratocruiser Clipper Sovereign Of The Skies ditched in the Pacific after losing two engines on a flight from Hawaii to the mainland. They circled the Coast Guard Cutter Pontchartrain for hours waiting for daylight and burning fuel. Everyone on board survived, and the story was dramatized in the 1958 movie Crash Landing, starring Nancy Davis (Reagan).

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_6

This Coast Guard film has footage of the ditching and rescue shot from the cutter.


Post Script: The 377 sure had some complicated engines, as the end of the piston era drew near. An air-cooled, supercharged, 28-cylinder, four-row radial engine? Wow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_&_Whitney_R-4360_Wasp_Major

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There were also the Wright Cyclone R-3350 with PRT's (power recovery turbines, or turbo compound engines) on the Connies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_R-3350_Duplex-Cyclone

 

That's another monster of an engine!

 

And the DC-7s as well. Their complexity is why the DC-6 outlived the DC-7 in the cargo trade that followed the types' removals from passenger service.

In fact, if you look at a list of airline incidents and accidents in the 1950s, the overwhelming high percentage was due to engine and/or propeller problems on aircraft powered by engines like the R-3350 and R-4360. In comparison, very few of the incidents and accidents in the 1960s were due to problems with jet engines, even the early ones. High-powered piston engines were like steam locomotives: the faster the operators could get rid of them, the better.

 

Three person cockpits were a necessity on those airplanes.

 

Three? Some had four or five, including a navigator and a radio operator.

 

When I was working on the flight line we were able to see a C-124 take off. As it pulled away and started a climb out we were amazed at the high pitched song that the R4360's were emitting. We were so used to the deep rumbling of the big radials that the corncobs with straight stacks really sounded like something else.

 

I posted it some time ago about my friend, a NWA pilot, who landed a 377 in Puget Sound due to uncontrollable vibrations and loss of lift. It turned out to be full deployment of the cowl flaps that should have been nearly closed at that time. The flight engineer was an ex-DC-7 FE and the cowl flap switches on that airplane operated in the opposite direction than those on the 377 and he had opened them wide open instead of close to trailing. The pilot said that he made a perfect landing without hurting anyone but a headstrong passenger decided to try to swim to Bainbridge Island and got hit by a rescue boat. Everybody else was rescued, I believe. My friend was blamed for the mishap even though he kept yelling at the flight engineer if the cowl flaps were closed. The buck stops here thing. The cowl flaps on a KC-97 or 377 are huge and when open, they cause extreme turbulence over the wing and horizontal tail.
The R4360 engines were complex and so was the flight engineer's panel and as Jim said, they couldn't get rid of them fast enough when the jets came out.