Customer Reviews

China Clipper: The Age of the Great Flying Boats

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For a book titled CHINA CLIPPER, THE AGE OF THE GREAT FLYING BOATS one would expect to read about the airplanes that conquered the Pacific in the middle 30's. Not so. It took this short 170 page book 99 pages before the China Clipper flew and then only 44 pages were spent on the golden age of these flying boats in the Pacific. Nice book about flying boats so if that is your cup of tea-fine. If you expect to have an in depth book on the operation of the "China Clipper", save your money

China Clipper: The Age of the Great Flying Boats
by Robert L. Gandt

Gandt's book is a well-written book full of detail and insight only a pilot could provide. I enjoyed his comments and antidotes on the technical details of wing loading, engine performance and tare loading. I can recommend the book to anyone with an interest in the history of the great flying boats. However, the title is a bit of a misnomer. It has only few pages on the commercial aviation conquest of the Pacific, specifically the Pan Am China Clipper - my passion.

[...]

The ocean-spanning flying boat was the 20th century's version of the Pony Express: Its career was glamorous, adventurous, expensive, romantic and short.
Airline pilot Robert Gandt packs a lot into his brief history, including technical, managerial and business concerns. The romance is here, but he makes the least of it.
For example, his account of the first ocean flight (no, not by Lindbergh) covers the fate of the Navy flying boat NC-3 in a paragraph, yet it ranks among the more dramatic stories of men at sea. And he tells the story of the first round-the-world flight of a commercial plane in police blotter fashion, when the risky escape of Capt. Robert Ford and his Pacific Clipper from the Japanese deserves a book of its own.
In spite of Gandt's dry-as-toast delivery, the Clippers' story is so intense that the book will nail you to your easy chair.
Hawaii played a key role in the development of the Clippers. Although the British inaugurated a scheduled air service from England to Australia just after World War I, they used land-based planes making short hops from one colony to another. True transoceanic flight was stymied by the problem of making it from San Francisco to Honolulu in one hop.
Bizarre solutions were tried. The Germans stationed ships in the mid-South Atlantic. Their medium-range flying boats landed at sea, were hoisted on the ships, refueled, then catapulted off for the next leg. The French also attacked the South America-Africa route with a series of typically beautiful but dangerous designs.
Meanwhile, the true solution to interocean flight was being worked out by Americans -- Juan Trippe at Pan American, the Russian immigrant Igor Sikorsky, Glenn Martin and Navy Adm. William Moffett. The military made and unmade the commercial flying boat.
Military R&D was critical to the creation of a globe-girdling air transportation system.
Flying boats were chosen for the first long-range air services for a simple reason: Airfields with long, paved runways didn't exist.
Although small flying boats were successful with short hops (including routes along the east coasts of the Americas) by the early '30s, the true ocean-spanning China Clipper did not fly until 1935.
The entranced public referred to all of Pan Am's ships as "China Clippers," harking back to the days of sail although in fact the company named each of its airliners for a different place -- Hawaii Clipper, Samoa Clipper, Philippine Clipper and so on.
Only three of the original China Clippers were built by the Martin company. Boeing built a better plane later, and this is the more familiar one.
But the original China Clipper spanned almost the entire era of the flying boat. From 1935 to 1945, she flew 2,400,000 miles, carrying 370,000 pounds of cargo (including precious uranium ore from the Congo that went into the atomic bomb), 380,000 pounds of mail and 3,500 passengers. In January 1945, the Clipper crashed off Lisbon.
A few months later, the surviving clippers were released by the military back to civilian life, but by then war had created hundreds of airstrips around the world, and long-legged, land-based airliners (notably the DC-4) had been developed.
Both France and Britain produced postwar clippers bigger and possibly better than any that had gone before, but progress had passed the flying boat by. A few still flew in New Zealand until 1960, bu the history of the big, passenger-carrying flying boat really ended on Dec. 7, 1941.

The book was full of interesting details, not only about the China Clipper itself but about some other airlines and seaplanes like the German DO-X, etc. Interesting pictures. Brings to light unknown facts about the race that was raging on during that period between United States, Great Britain and Germany.

I begin with the good things about this book. First, it ties together the flying boat project across the US, the UK,France and Germany in fashion that begins to relate one to the other both as technical tasks and as business ventures. Although written from an American perspective, it is reasonably appreciative of the activities of the other participants. It does focus on the decade from 1930 to 1940 which is sensible enough since that is when the big flying boats has their opportunities for success. Second, the author's background as a pilot gives him the ability to explain the technical and operational details in a simple and straightforward way for a lay audience. Third, this book is really quite well illustrated with many photographs of people and airplanes, an appendix of plan drawings of the significant big flying boats, and end papers that compare top shadow views of quite a few of them as well.

In what ways does this book fall short? For one thing it is just too short for the complex story. Less than 200 pages of text in 26 short chapters is not enough. Secondly, although the comparative specification and performance charts in the appendix are interesting they are significantly incomplete. The author, with good reason, focuses signifcant time in the narrative discussing loaded weight to tare weight ratios and wing loadings but there are no comparative charts of these, which would have been simple enought to do.

In fact the development of the big flying boats was a fascinating collision of political, business and technical issues and I get the impression the author knew a great deal more than ended up in this book. It is perhaps a fault of mine to criticize books for what they are not, not what they are, but the definitive history of the commercial flying boat has yet to be written. This is an interesting, if tantalizing and a bit frustrating, introduction.

Having read several books on flying boats, I was anxious to get this and read it.

My expectations were fullfilled. This book is an in depth presentation of not only the developement of the flying boats throughout the world during the interwar years, but the human and political problems that surfaced. I found it to be an excellent read, typical of Robert Gant's writing and at the same time very informative.