Big Splash - Forbes.com Flying boats like the China Clipper live on for collectors and for owners of the few remaining craft. During the worst of Southern California's wildfires last October residents of Lake Elsinore saw something as unlikely as a reincarnated Andrea Doria steaming into Long Beach Harbor: Out of the smoky sky came a craft the size and color of a big red barn, its wingspan larger than a 747's. It skimmed the surface of the lake at 80 mph, ingesting (through a probe) 7,200 gallons of water in 27 seconds. Then it lifted off to irrigate the fires. What locals had just seen was a vestige of the flying boat era--a 1940s Martin Mars. Before WWII, when airports were rarer, planes that could land and take off from water enjoyed an advantage. Passengers who wanted to fly from San Francisco, say, to Hawaii or the Philippines had a choice of flying boats or nothing. As operated by Pan Am, these planes had romantic names like the China Clipper and offered comforts you don't even see in first class today. The Boeing (nyse: BA - news - people ) 314, which Pan Am started flying in 1939, accommodated up to 74 passengers. Thomas Flanagan, a B-314 captain from 1942 to 1946, remembers that meals were made from scratch and served in a 14-seat dining room. Passengers enjoyed 36 sleeping berths, six private compartments, two dressing rooms, a lounge, even an overnight shoe-polishing service. The crew was four pilots, two engineers, two radio operators, one navigator and two cabin attendants. Clippers carried the likes of Bogart and Hemingway. The one-way fare in 1940 from S.F. to Hong Kong was $760 (about $11,000 today). Boeing built a dozen before World War II halted commercial transatlantic and transpacific flight. During the war the British and American navies purchased all 12 planes from Pan Am and used them to carry soldiers, officers and even the commander in chief: President Roosevelt rode a B-314 to Yalta in 1943. When Pan Am went bust in 1991 hundreds of ex-employees took it upon themselves to preserve the airline's legacy. Now thousands of collectors have embraced this obsession. Anything with a Pan Am logo draws bids on Ebay, from swizzle sticks ($12) to cigarette lighters ($260). A single chipped plate from a clipper kitchen fetches $200. A set of wings for your lapel can cost $800. Kelly Cusack, a former Pan Am-er who worked his way from baggage handler to manager of a $40 million corporate airline account, has devoted an entire room of his Rancho Mirage, Calif. home to his Pan Am collection. His Clipper Club contains 4,000 items, which he has catalogued in 30 spreadsheets in order to avoid duplication in future purchases. Cusack's specialty is dinnerware, and one of his most prized possessions is a flying boat china platter. "Drop your china teapot," he says, "and you've just blown $1,000." The most desirable item would be a B-314 itself. Of the 12 clippers built by Boeing out of aluminum alloy, 11 made it through World War II. One crashed off the coast of Lisbon in 1943; 2 were fatally damaged in storms after the war. The Allies offered to sell the surviving clippers back to Pan Am, but airports built during the war had turned the flying boat into an albatross. According to Stan Cohen, author of Wings to the Orient: Pan American Clipper Planes 1935 to 1945, the U.S. Navy sank the last of the B-314s off the coast of Baltimore in 1951. Kermit Weeks, an oil heir who operates a Florida museum and theme park called Fantasy of Flight, wishes he could get his hands on one. His $40 million collection of vintage planes includes a 1944 Short Sunderland, the last four-engine passenger flying boat in the world still capable of flight. In 1993 Weeks bought the 57,000-pound aircraft for $500,000 from an owner who had acquired it from former Pan Am pilot Charlie Blair. Weeks flew it across the Atlantic, becoming the last flying boat pilot to complete a transatlantic hop. He estimates the Sunderland is now worth at least $1 million. He'd love a 314, he says, but doubts any of the sunken clippers is worth salvaging. If one should turn up intact, he speculates, it could fetch $6 million. The only other boats of the B-314's heft now flying are a pair of Martin Mars. (Howard Hughes' wooden Hercules H-4, a.k.a. the "Spruce Goose," is mothballed in an Oregon museum; see box). Originally built as long-range military transports, each Mars could fly from San Francisco to Hawaii on a third of its 10,000-gallon gas tank. In 1959 the two survivors were converted into water bombers by Flying Tankers, a firefighting company serving the timber industry. Even though no clippers survive, the next-best thing exists at the Foynes Flying Boat Museum, at Pan Am's former Atlantic flying boat terminus in Foynes, Ireland. In 2006 the museum commissioned a $700,000 life-size replica of a B-314 (about $150,000 more than Pan Am paid for each plane originally, in 1936 dollars). Museum founder and director, Margaret O'Shaughnessy, expects the new exhibit will double the museum's annual attendance of 25,000. Her one lament: Visitors from the U.S. won't be arriving via flying boat. "There is no comparison," she muses, referring to the clippers. "They were more spacious, more leisurely. It wasn't so much about numbers in those days." IN BOOKS, ON FILM AND AT MUSEUMS The following can help you imagine what it was like to travel via clipper. Movies: China Clipper, with Humphrey Bogart as the crusty clipper skipper (1936); Foreign Correspondent, directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1940). Books: Wings to the Orient, by Stan Cohen (2005), a pictorial history; Night Over Water, by Ken Follett (1991), a spy novel. Museums and attractions: Foynes Flying Boat Museum (Foynes, Ireland, near Limerick) has a life-size B-314 replica: Fly back in time at the Foynes Flying Boat Museum. Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum (McMinnville, Ore., near Portland) has Howard Hughes' "Spruce Goose": Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum. Fantasy of Flight (Polk City, Fla., near Orlando) has a big WWII British flying boat--the Short Sunderland--plus many other vintage planes: Fantasy of Flight, World's Greatest Aircraft Collection.
Kermit Weeks? I was going to take the pee but with that much money he can afford to have any name he likes!
No, whatever you do, don't take the piss out of KW!!!! He has a phenomenal collection of WWII and pre-WWII aircraft that will blow you away. He is renowned, because he has the money, for his extensive and realistic restorations, fully kitted out with everything. He also has some extremely rare aircraft. His grandfather or great Uncle or whatever designed a piece of equipment that no oil drilling operation can do without so, as a result, gets x amount of cents for every barrel of oil sold or something crazy like that (might be limited to particular projects). Anyhoo, with a relative that rich, much of the family rested on their laurels but Kermit went off and made a name for himself as an aerobatic pilot. He was subsequently awarded the inheritance when the time came as he had been the only one to go and achieve something. Got told all this by someone in the know several years ago so it's probably far from accurate.
Last I heard, the last two Martin Mars were in serious danger of being scrapped, so hopefully if their usefulness was demonstrated by these fires, they will be reprieved. Kermit used to be a perfectly normal boy's name. Theodore Roosevelt had a son and a grandson called Kermit. The son served with British Army with distinction in WW1, and again at the start of WW2, though sadly committed suicide after being invalided out with health problems related to his alcoholism. The grandson was a life-long CIA operative. But since the frog was more famous than all of them, I doubt there will be many more Kermits.
I think the Mars' were finally bought by a private forester last year to look after his assets. Interesting info on TR. Will look them up!
