PBY Catalinas Fly Again Over Oahu

lovely airplane. pensacola nas has a great pby display

 

There is a nice documentary on Netflix about a group of Aussies who brought home and restored a Catalina

http://www.amazon.com/Return-Catalina-Rex-Senior/dp/B078NZXZKY

 

Definitely one of those 'if you had unlimited funds' which aircraft would you like to have.

 

For me it’s a tossup between the PBY and an Albatross

 

Any flying boat would be nice, just the PBY is more nostalgic. I'd settle for a Widgeon with IO-520 conversion

 

Just watched it fly along the south shore. Very cool.
I would not have known what I was looking had I not seen this thread. Thanks for that.

 

PBY's were crucial in the early stages of the Battle of Midway.
https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/OnlineLibrary/photos/events/wwii-pac/midway/mid-1m.htm
Cool airplane!
T

 

My Dad got his wings in Pensacola and got my Mom at a USO dance there. As kids in the 50's, we'd travel back there each summer and would swim at the Navy base beach. PBY's were shooting touch and goes all the time while we swam.

 

Roll back the clock a few years to December 1941.My Dad was going through OCS in Jax. My Mom was a telephone operator. Stop me if this sounds like a bad movie. He ended up flying Black Cats in the Pacific. Somewhere I have a tape of the initial flight from Coronado to Hawaii in radio silence. He was sure glad to see those islands.

Ps I grew up in Pensacola during the '60s. It was great fun.

 

If you missed the Islands, there was a whole lot of nothing all around. Not much nav gear back then, a sextant and a compass and maybe some RF DF if you got close enough.

 

During my four year sentence in Gulf Breeze in the '80s, I often mistook UFOs for PBYs.

 

https://www.civilbeat.org/2020/08/a-historic-flyby-takes-to-the-skies-around-oahu/

The planes in the flyby cover a variety of World War II types. They are scheduled in this order:

• Globe Swift.
• B-25 Mitchell.
• P-51 Mustang.
• TBM Avenger.
• Four T-6 Texans.
• Two PBY-5 Catalinas.
• Two Stearman trainers.
• T-28 Trojan. A later, postwar training plane.
• F-8 Bearcat.
• Grumman Wildcat.
View attachment 2997052

 

Are these planes locally owned? I'm just curious if they were mainland planes......how did they get them there?

 

Yup. Dead reckoning. Did I mention it was cloudy the whole way?

 

Sentence?