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Subject: What ever happened to Seaplanes?
leoinnyc    11/2/2003 10:34:59 AM
I know that this is probably the wrong forum for this question, but why don't we still use seaplanes? They seem so useful, both for the military and civil aviation. They could resupply ships at sea, be little sub tenders; perform major rescue ops at sea. An air tanker varient could fly into the theatre from CONUS during a big conflict, take on jet fuel directly from a supply ship and hugely enhance the Navy's tanker capabilities for like, no money. They'd also be great for SEAL and Marine Recon insertion. I can think of lots of other stuff. And they'd be a natural compliment to the Mobile Offshore Base concept. And for civil air, they'd do wonders for airport congestion anywhere near the ocean or a big lake. Here in NY we have a major airport congestion issue, despite having three major airports. But we've got a huge harbor and underused port facilities.
And anyway, when they're not being used as seaplanes, they can always operate from regular runways, so there's no tradeoff in capability.

What do y'all think?
 
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Heorot    RE:What ever happened to Seaplanes?   11/2/2003 12:03:58 PM
There is a distinction to be made here. I assume by seaplane that you are using the term generically for any aircraft that can land and take off from water. There are actually 3 types of aircraft categories here. 1. Seaplane or more commonly called floatplanes. These are small and can only land on fairly still water like lakes or rivers. They look like normal light aircraft but with floats instead of wheels. 2. Amphibians. These are about the same size as floatplanes, but have a flying boat hull shape to land on water and retractable wheels for landing on land. These can land on choppier waters than seaplanes but not the open sea. 3. Flying Boats. These are the big boys that have a fuselage designed for landing on water and don?t usually have wheels at all. Of the above, only flying boats have any real use to the military. The Japanese deploy their ShinMaywa flying boats for maritime patrol and rescue (although ShinMaywa refer to it as an amphibian, it is the size of a flying boat and uses its wheels for manoeuvring rather than landing). There are other flying boats in use for firefighting but none (apart from historical aircraft) in use for civilian passengers. It is difficult to use jet propulsion (although Beriev of Russia tried) because of the ingestion of seawater into the engines and passengers these days expect their air transport to be jet powered. Also landing on the sea is inherently more dangerous than landing on a runway. Any serious kind of chop on the sea surface will make the landing problematic as will any floating debris. The landing distances are also huge as they tend to land at a much shallower angle than land based aircraft. Beriev are still making amphibians for firefighting and a new model was certificated in June 2003. Their site is here: link
 
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Slade    RE:What ever happened to Seaplanes?   11/2/2003 1:58:25 PM
The large number of airbases built in the Pacific during WWII that became civilian airports after the war eliminated one of the major area where civilian passenger seaplanes may have been useful had history been different. The floats or boat hull on floatplanes/flying boats have poor arodynamics so they have poor performance compared to land based types. The widespread use of aerial refueling in military aircraft made that a faster,cheaper and safer way to refuel than landing next to a sub. Helicopters provided a more flexible and effective in higher seas rescuce platform. There are still areas where floatplanes are useful, a bush aircraft in Alaska, N. Minnesota, Canada. Firefighting in remote areas with access to lakes. That kind of stuff.
 
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leoinnyc    RE:What ever happened to Seaplanes?   11/2/2003 2:06:33 PM
makes sense. Too bad; they're neat.
 
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leoinnyc    RE:But...   11/2/2003 2:40:12 PM
...still, the US, especially the Navy still uses props (P-3, C-2, E-2C, C-130) and that Beriev jet is neat; it's got a 2000 mile range -- Russia just ordered another one, and supposedly Chine, Greece, and some other countries are interested in them. It would just be interesting to see what you could do if you were designing a fully modern flying boat, from the ground up...
 
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Nichevo    RE:But...what about WIG/ekranoplan?   11/2/2003 9:17:54 PM
Now THAT is a seaplane. (I assume they would be designed to land at sea.)
 
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leoinnyc    RE:But...what about WIG/ekranoplan?   11/3/2003 7:46:42 PM
yes!
 
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Dancing Johnny    RE:What ever happened to Seaplanes?   11/5/2003 7:13:15 PM
There are just too many of the things mentioned in the original post that are done better with regular ships and planes to make seaplanes\flying boats feasible. This is why the US Navy got rid of their last ones (the Marlins) in the 60's. One of the major problems with flying boats is that you cannot land them everywhere and anytime, they are pretty much limited by the current sea state (how rough the water is). There are plenty of stories of flying boats landing at a rescue site then not being able to take off again because the water was too rough, or the plane being too heavy with rescuee's, it's much better to drop a life raft, then send in a helocopter or ship thats in the area. And the waters around most major cities are just too congested with small boats and ships. Resupply ships by air, that's so funny. We in the US Navy will just keep our supply ships, thank you very much! But really, we already do enough resupply by air, by either COD aircraft, helocopter, or in the case I was involved with, droping by parachute from a P-3, to a Frigate that was in the middle of nowhere, some badly needed repair parts. You could justify the need for a seaplane\flying boat, but you couldn't justify the cost of maintaining a squadon or two of them.
 
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Thomas    RE:What ever happened to Seaplanes?   11/6/2003 7:18:31 AM
One of my standard stories is about the air force colonel, who shall remain nameless that was transported by a Catalina (one of the best flying boats ever build) from Copenhagen to Aalborg. Now the Cat wasn't the fastest plane, so relieve boredom he resorted to liquid refreshments, and with the time it took, a lot of liquid refreshments. So when they landed in Aalborg he had plainly forgotten it was a seaplane as he stepped off. That is one of the reasons airforces have killed the seaplane!
 
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Heorot    RE:What ever happened to Seaplanes?   11/6/2003 2:17:20 PM
The only role these days that the flying boat/amphibian is the best at is as a firefighting waterbomber. They can reload with water by skimming low over a lake and lowering a probe. After just a few seconds, they are fully loaded and ready to drop.
 
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Ordie    RE:What ever happened to Seaplanes?   12/11/2003 12:39:12 AM
In modewrn warfare... they're VERY vulnerable! Sea state dictates where they can operate from... or land on. Arming and refueling are a nightmare if the aircraft is afloat... and if it were an amphibian... it may as well be land based. Jet engines are very succeptable to salt water corrosion... and injestion of sea water. The sea only complicates the corrosion control problem. Other than small harbor areas with little room for an airfield... the small civilan amphibs are good for little more than air taxis and sightseeing. As a weapons or recon platform... no way. We experimented with those (Sea Master and Sea Dart) back in the '50's... got some good aircrews killed in the R&D process.
 
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Aardwolf    RE:What ever happened to Seaplanes?   12/20/2003 6:30:46 PM
The SeaMaster was a good aircraft, problems that caused the crashes had been solved before it was cancelled. It still is, AFAIK, the most advanced flying boat ever built in terms of both hydrodynamic and aerodynamic performance. It was significantly faster than any B-52 at low level, and if it had been similarly large and powerful (and amphibious), would have actually made a better penetration or saturation bomber--which would not have been tied to huge airbase installations.
 
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wagner95696    RE:What ever happened to Seaplanes?   1/1/2004 1:50:35 PM
The P6M Seamaster was an excellent plane and capable of transonic speed, actually went supersonic once it a dive. Technology has changed in the last 45 years, titanium, composites, etc. Much of the corrosion problem would be easily solvable today. The engine corrosion problems for a jet or turboprop seaplane should not be any different from those of any naval aircraft. Really, what difference is there between an F-18 coming in at 50 feet or a P6M doing the same? Compared to helicopter carried AEW or air-surface radar, seaplanes would have more range, endurance, speed, and payload. The only thing it could not do is hover, however a seaplane could fly 1,000 miles offshore, land, pick up 25-50 survivors and return. True if weather is too rough to land it is at a disadvantage but helicopters can not effect rescues in all weather conditions, either, and they can only rescue a few and if you need to go farther than a 'spit and a holler' and do it in less than 'tomorrow and a half' choppers themselves are useless. Seaplanes do not require a longer landing run than landplanes, most require far lesser landing and takeoff rolls. Take off and landing can be a bit rough but much of this could be eliminated by using tilt wing or gyropter main rotore that would significantly reduce take-off and landing speeds. True there are times when seaplanes would not be able to operate because of sea conditions but there are times whem helicopters and surface ships, including CVN's, can not operate because of weather/surface conditions. The P6M was supposedly able to operate 85 % of days in the North Atlantic, better elsewhere. Because of their superior seakeeping abilities large seaplanes could loiter on the surface for ASW or in many AEW or airborne surveillance situations. With reasonable warning AEW seaplanes could easily evade threating enemy aircraft just as AWACS does. Helicopter AEW does not have the capability to avoid enemy fighter threats. Large seaplanes armed with AS miles could deny huge areas of the ocean too far from land to be covered by land based patrol planes to enemy surface ships unaccompanied by carrier fighter planes. Furthermore, compared with surface ships, they would be almost immune to attacks from submarines. P6M was not cancelled because of any defects of the plane but because the 'carrier admirals' saw it as a threat to the strategic (nuclear) role of of carrier aviation. I remember when Tradewinds operated out of Alameda. They were great planes crippled by a piece of Allison crap (turboprop engines). They could serve in antisubmarine, patrol, and transport roles and set turbo-prop speed records that still stand. If a similar plane were built today using modern corrosion resistant materials, powered by a modern high power fuel efficient turboprops [TP400-D6 @ 11,000 shp, each], and equiped with modern electronics it could replace much of the surface fleet. Essentially it could do almost anything that cruisers were expected to do in the old days; scouting; screening; trade route raiding. Imagine the modern equivalent of the Altmark and the Graf Spee only with a seaplane tender and a squadron of modern seaplanes armed with missiles. No navy without carriers [that is 90% of the world's fleets] could stay at sea against them.
 
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hybrid    RE:What ever happened to Seaplanes?   1/1/2004 5:16:16 PM
A couple of things here. Seaplanes are very maintenance intensive (hence why Boeing's Pelican WIG idea isn't a seaplane). They take a beating taking off and landing since the hull is being accelerated at around 150-200 mph and especially during landing this is the equivalent of hitting a brick wall while traveling at the same speed. Combine that with saltwater landings and you get all sorts of materials engineering problems you run into. I'm not saying it isn't POSSIBLE to do it. Just very very very expensive to maintain if you're using jet propulsion and carrying very large loads.
 
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gf0012-aus    Seaplane technology - Floatplanes   1/1/2004 5:53:29 PM
I've always wondered why with the current cost effectiveness and flexibility of compound polymers, carbon fibre technology etc... why this hasn't been revisited. There does appear to be a capability to use seaplanes as multi mission platforms, even small ones assigned to LHA/docks as spotters/CAS for landings etc... There seems to be a view that a platform should provide outright capability for a task, when what we are witnessing across all military technologies is platform flexibility. We don't necessarily need to go back to monster Berievs or Mariners etc... but the capacity to use an Albatross sized seaplane or a BN Islander sized floatplane for MMA/CSAR/SAR becomes a very flexible additive for an expeditionary force.
 
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Aardwolf    RE:What ever happened to Seaplanes?   1/4/2004 11:19:33 PM
>>True there are times when seaplanes would not be able to operate because of sea conditions but there are times whem helicopters and surface ships, including CVN's, can not operate because of weather/surface conditions. The P6M was supposedly able to operate 85 % of days in the North Atlantic, better elsewhere. So give it retractable _landing_ gear instead of beaching gear, like later Catalinas and the PBM-5A. It'd have better operational flexibility then anyway. An amphibious B-52 size Seamaster with B-52 range and load carrying capabilities would have been one potent system. (The P6M itself would have been impressive enough, all the more so if it had the ability to use land bases if it needed to.)
 
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