Flying Boats--When Traveling in Style Meant Elegance, Leisure

Howard Hughes had a thing about flying boats.

The late billionaire built the legendary Spruce Goose, and though the huge wooden craft made only one short flight, it brings thousands of visitors to the Long Beach tourist complex it shares with the liner Queen Mary.

Not as well known is that Hughes had at least three other flying boats. Two have been scrapped. The third is the last link to the days of the planes that joined continents with luxury flight, says a man who has spent 10 years researching the aircraft.

“She was the Orient Express of the air,” Ed Davies said of the flying boat that sits next to the Western Aerospace Museum, ignominiously perched on wheels.

The planes that became a byword for elegance in the air were born of necessity. Aviation technology had simply gotten ahead of itself. During the 1930s, planes could be made powerful enough to circle the globe, but they were too big to land at airports.

The answer was the flying boat. Its runway was the water.

The 90-foot long Solent Mark III was built in 1946 by Short Brothers Ltd. of England. It carried a maximum of 34 passengers between the island nation and Africa for British Overseas Airways Corp. on a leisurely 4 1/2-day flight, said Davies, a local aviation writer.

There were four overnight stops on the 5,600 nautical-mile route from Southampton to Vaaldam, a lake on the Vaal River.

“There’s nothing like it left in the United States,” said Davies, who with other volunteers is working to restore the plane.

The Pan American Clippers that zoomed across the Atlantic and Pacific shortly before World War II, providing the best-known chapter in flying boat lore, can only be glimpsed in old movies, he said.

“Here we have a touch of how it was,” Davies said.

There is a long way to go before the plane is restored to the condition of its heyday. But the volunteers have managed to produce a trace of the elegance enjoyed by pampered passengers aboard the plane with a hull so big it held three decks.

As visitors enter the lower deck, they step into a small bar. To the rear is the women’s powder room. Three passenger compartments are to the front, each entered through watertight doors.

A table set for fine dining gives new meaning to “airline food.”

The windows provide superb viewing. Passengers could watch wildlife as the plane swooped low over the veldt on its journey across Africa.

The seats are plush. Plush enough for Harrison Ford, who sat in one during a scene in the 1981 movie “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

Headrests are so comfortable it is easy to fall asleep.

“But the plane wasn’t a sleeper,” Davies said. “It landed and the passengers stayed the night at hotels.”

The four-engined Solent, dubbed the City of Cardiff when it flew for BOAC, was not designed to haul passengers. Its original mission was to hunt submarines for the Royal Air Force.

The plane missed World War II, a conflict that saw the growth of airplanes and runways to handle them. The days of the flying boat were numbered.

The City of Cardiff eventually island-hopped around the South Pacific before it was bought by a shipping line that in turn sold it and two sister planes to Hughes.

Hughes kept the three under guard in nearby Richmond. The three flying boats deteriorated and, when the reclusive billionaire died in 1976, his Summa Corp. sold the planes for junk.

Rick and Randy Grant, partners in an oceanographic engineering firm, managed to buy one before it was broken up.

They and the volunteers hope to make the plane airworthy.

For now, a visitor can stand on the flight deck and gaze out the pilot’s window. It does not take much imagination to get a feel of how it was--the increasing tempo of the engines as the plane races down the water, the sea spray slashing at the cockpit glass, the hull slowly freeing itself until it reaches for the sky. And there is always the bar.