Flying Boat is a new documentary feature film by Dirk Braun about the golden age of the flying boat, and the people who keep the surviving examples in the air today – many decades after they were first built.
Official Film Description
Before there were an abundance of airports, flying boats ruled the skies. The first flying boat was pioneered in 1910 in France by a man named Henri Fabre. The era between 1929-late 1930s was when flying boats would take passengers in sumptuous interiors to far flung places around the world.
The film is worth watching for the stories told by those who know these remarkable places best, but the stunning cinematography is also worth a mention – it’s a sight to see.
Realizing that major cities had harbors, Juan Trippe, the innovative chairman of Pan American Airways, surmised that long distance air travel would require flying boats. Beginning in 1931, Trippe commissioned a fleet of aircraft he called Clippers, named for the swift, topsail schooners that plied merchant trade during the 19th century.
By 1936, flying boats carried passengers and cargo throughout the Caribbean, Central and South America, and across the Pacific Ocean to China. This all but impossible feat is nearly forgotten today. The last of the surviving ocean Clippers is the amphibious Grumman Albatross flying boat.
Built with tremendous durability by Grumman “Iron Works,” these versatile aircraft have an astonishing range. When fully fueled they can fly non-stop from San Francisco to Honolulu, or New York to Europe — and can operate on land or in the open ocean, handling rough seas with 6-8ft swells.
A network of runways were built during WWII. While the flying boat era was the most romantic era in aviation history, it was short-lived. After World War II, the advent of turbocharged engines, pressurized cabins and later jets, moved commercial aviation away from the flying boat.
Before WWII and in the years shortly after it was flying boats like this that most often carried passengers on cross-continental or cross-oceanic journeys – as they could land on any bay, lake, or large river, and didn’t need an airport.
As helicopter technology advanced in the 1950s, the military search and rescue mission of the Albatross diminished. Gradually the type was removed from military inventories and sent to the “Boneyard” at Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson AZ, where rows of obsolete fighters, bombers, tankers and transports lie in permanent storage.
This film tells the story of the restoration and repurposing of these fabled machines. The profile of a flying boat in harbor, like skyscrapers and streamlined locomotives, fast motor cars and big cities, embodies an Art Deco essence that gave expression to big dreams of the 20th century.
Surviving flying boats are beautiful functioning sculpture that come alive as they fly through the air and glide on the water. The curious few who own, fly, and maintain these restored machines have in common a deep passion for the fundamental idea of a flying boat: a vessel of biblical aspiration, made in the mind and born by the hand of man, that can fly off the sea up into the sky with soul-searing beauty and consummate grace.
Of the Albatrosses flying today, most were resurrected from the Boneyard and restored after being neglected for decades. The investment in time, money, and talent to make them fly again is enormous. It is an incandescent story of what happens when aspiration meets achievement and the challenge to imagination is met.
You can see the film on Amazon here – or buy the DVD here.
Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
