Graham Coster, a stylishly literate aficionado of aeronautics, moved by the nostalgia of old men, has written a romantic history of the dodo of aviation.
Flying boats, aircraft with boat-like hulls, once seemed such a good idea; about three quarters of the world is under water. But it was an idea whose commercial heyday passed at the beginning of the second World War. In the subsequent age of mass travel, most people are in a hurry to fly from city to city. "Landplanes," Coster points out, "are urban phenomena."
Imperial Airways, ancestors of British Airways, operated a fleet of 28 flying boats built by Short in 1934, with large government subsidies, eventually to carry the mail to Britain's dominions. Though this was the era of the Depression, the craft that delivered the Empire Air Mail were as luxurious as first-class accommodation aboard ships.
Each carried 24 passengers, a travelling elite with money to spare. At 200 miles an hour, the majestic four-engined leviathans had a range of only 800 miles. Taking off at dawn on intercontinental journeys, they put down on sea, lake or river for breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner, as well as fuel. Flights were in daylight. At night passengers relaxed comfortably in hotels and rest-houses. What was the rush?
As a former assistant editor of Granta, Coster looked for the flying boat in literature and noticed that "Where you find a flying boat you will also find the extravagant, the quixotic, the whimsical." One day, he feels, someone should write a thesis on The Flying Boat in British Fiction. In the meantime, he offers some colourful citations from both fiction and non-fiction.
He conducted his research not only in libraries and by interviewing many survivors of the flying-boat era. As far as possible nowadays, he journeyed where the flying boats once flew, especially on the Empire service from Southhampton to Durban.
He envied his predecessors. From the flying boats' big observation windows, flying relatively slowly at altitudes as low as 1,000 feet, they were seeing Africa, as Alan Moorehead wrote, "as Livingstone and the other early explorers had seen it." What can one see from a 747 at 30,000 feet? A drinks trolley and a movie.
During the war, Sunderland flying boats played an important part, on long-range anti-submarine patrols in Coastal Command, which was known as "the RAF's four-engined yacht club". Brian Inglis, twice on the staff of The Irish Times, was the captain of the first Sunderland off the production line. In his autobiography, he called his 12-hour patrols "as boring a wartime job as could be imagined" - but appreciated flying-boat amenities, such as a galley for hot meals and a wardroom for siestas.
Coster tells the story, in dramatic and amusing detail, of the crash of the flying boat Corsair in the River Dungu in what was then the Belgian Congo, and the protracted, finally successful efforts to repair the boat and fly it out. Engineers from Britain had to raise the level of the river by building a dam, with the labour of hundreds of Africans, each paid a penny a day, the local wartime rate. The natives optimistically called Corsair the "canoe that goes for up".
The pilot who completed the rescue operation was Capt. Jack Kelly-Rogers, an Irishman. It was he who later flew Winston Churchill from the US to Bermuda to England after a Washington summit conference with Roosevelt. Kelly-Rogers allowed the Prime Minister a turn at the flying boat's controls, and arranged to have his slippers warmed in the galley stove.
Coster rounds off his affectionate survey with reports of flights in Chalk's antique Grumman Mallard flying boat from Florida to the Bahamas and in various seaplanes around Alaska. There are maps and photographs.
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic.