I always thought that these birds were so graceful and elegant; it's sad to see one like this. Abandoned Catalina seaplane: 50 years between the sea and the desert Image Unavailable, Please Login
Aamzing story behind it! And it even shows up on Google Earth - 28°05'27.02"N 34°36'30.93"E Image Unavailable, Please Login
Hugh Hefner had one in the 60's. It had couches/beds under the rear machine blisters. I imagine you could got just about anywhere. Slowly.
That's sad to see. I have vivid memories of a PBY5 flying all night up and down the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay helping us to find two crew members who bailed out of a B-17 that had been struck by lightning during a violent August thunder storm in 1945. The Catalina flew in and out of the boiling clouds, lightning, and heavy rain literally ALL NIGHT dropping flares at minimum altitude. It was a display of Navy airmanship and the incredible duration of that old plodding airplane. We started searching around midnite near the mouth of the York River and he didn't leave until about 0900 the next morning which was only about 40% of the duration that it was capable of. That was the eeriest apparition that I ever saw as the airplane sometimes flew on the near side of the light from the flares and it's image was projected huge on the mist and clouds between the airplane and us on shore. The bright flashes of lightning only added to the ghostly sights that we were seeing. We found the bodies of the two crew members in the water a week later
On one hand, it's sad to see it relegated to rotting away in the dessert. On the other hand, the story behind it and the history it marks is amazing.
Fascinating story of an airborne pleasure cruise turning into a nightmare. I wonder whether any photos exist of the plane in its "luxury flying yacht" heyday.
I googled N5593. Scroll down this page... http://www.mekshat.com/vb/showthread.php?t=46312&page=4 This was the secondary source for the photo. The Internet never ceases to amaze me! http://www.controltowers.co.uk/C/Croydon_photo.htm
You can read a first person account of the incident, along with nice pictures of the airplane beforehand, here: http://books.google.com/books?id=7U4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA65&lpg=PA65&dq=life+magazine+thomas+kendall&source=bl&ots=sQNE3O21Ca&sig=CQ6Q-C5CVudV33mNyNuERkw3xf0&hl=en&ei=gwBTTOj8NoLGsAPp9PDNBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CDcQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q&f=false
Thanks, I'll never forget that night tramping around in the pouring rain in the swamps bordering the bay. It didn't matter where we stepped or fell in the dark,it was wet one way or another. We were retracing grounds that were fought over in the Revolution and the Civil War but were still wild in 1945. We flushed out bears and deer in some areas and saw maybe two lights from houses. We spent a week out there searching the shore in 90 deg. heat and eventually found those for whom we were searching, still in their parachutes and Mae Wests. The airplane, by the way, had the No. 1 engine knocked out and all the radar wiring burned out and the instruments. It was a " Mickey Ship" and full of elex. The pilot landed at night in a rain storm by seat of the pants feel minus his navigator and bomb aimer.
Yeah, that wasn't the best week I ever spent. We knew that we had found them on the shoreline when we were still 600 yards away. Excuse my error. I meant to say 600 feet, 200 yards. The breeze was blowing toward us.
I pulled up the York River area on Google Earth to see if I could locate where we made our search and I think that I did. The bonus to my digging was to scroll down to Langley Field and I saw that my old barracks and most of the original buildings are still there as well as the low speed and high speed wind tunnels and I think the spin test tunnel that was near our barracks. The dirigible hangar is gone, however. The ramp has been expanded and the B-17's and B-24's have been replaced by F-15's. I stared at that for an hour.
"Y" was the manufacturer code designation for Consolidated Aircraft. So PBY stood for Patrol Bomber Consolidated. "D" was for Douglas, "F" for Grumman, "U" for Vought, etc.
It should show F-22's by now and, unfortunately, the big wind tunnel is slated for dismantling... http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/Last-Breath.html
Wade, thanks for the update on the demise of the wind tunnel, sad. There was also a wind tunnel on the eastern edge of the base that was driven by huge electric motors. They could only run it at night after 2400 because of the huge draw-down of power. If we were on the line when they started them the ground would hum and vibrate long before we could hear the groan of the motors and the roar of the blades. We saw the 1/2 size wind tunnel model vertical fin and horizontal stab of the Hughes H-1 flying boat being brought in to run in the full-size tunnel. At the time we thought that it was a full sized airplane since it was over 20 feet tall.
