Flying Boats of the World
A Photographic Reference
Sorted by Country, Year and Model

Links to Country Pages	Manufacturers by Country
Australia	Wackett
Austria	Lohner
Brazil	EDRA Flyer Indiana Náutica Microleve Unknown (Carcara & Jaburu)
Canada	AAC (SeaStar) Canadian Boeing Canadair Canadian Vickers Curtiss Canada Viking Air (Trident Tri-Gull)
Communist China	Harbin
France Revisions underway: try Version 1	Amiot Bellanger-Denhaut Besson Blanchard Bleriot Borel-Odier Breguet C.A.M.S. Caudron Denhaut Donnet-Leveque Farmen F.B.A. Hanriot Kits & Homebuilts & ULM Latécoère Latham Levasseur Levy Lioré et Olivier Nieuport Nord Penhoet-Richard Potez Romano S.N.C.A.N. S.N.C.A.O. S.N.C.A.S.E. S.P.C.A. Tellier
German Revisions underway: try Version 1	Blohm Und Voss Dornier Equator Fizir Fokker Hansa & Brandenburg Heinkel Junkers LFG Rohrback Rumpler Schiefer Waserflug
Italy Revisions underway: try Version 1	Aermacchi Baganfibio CANT Caproni CMASA Fiat Macchi Piaggio Savoia SeaStorm SIAI
Japan Revisions underway: try Version 1	Aichi Hiro Kawanishi NiPpi Shin-Meiwa Yokosuka
Netherlands Revisions underway: try Version 1	Fokker Gamely
Poland	Nikol-A2
Russia (öÍÊÞÌÄÕÚ) Revisions underway: try Version 1	Aeroprakt Beriev Chetverikov Engels Grigorovich Maslov NPP&Aerorik OKB&Pegasus Refly Shavrov Tupolev To Sort Space Shuttle
United Kingdom Revisions underway: try Version 1	Blackburn-General Centaur Cork Fairey Felixstowe NormanThompson Ross SARO Short Sopwith Supermarine Vickers
United States of America Revisions underway: try Version 1	Aeromarine Benoist Boeing Burgess Christofferson Clippers Consoidated Convair Curtiss Douglas Eastman Ecker Fairchild Fleetwings General GeneralDynamic GeorgeLevy Gevers Goodyear Grumman Hall Hughes Lockheed Loening Martin Molt Peel Sikorsky Spencer Sperry Thurston Viking Vought WACO Wright
USA Homebuilt & Ultralights Revisions underway: try Version 1	AdventureAir Aerolites Anderson ArnetPereyra Avid Buccaneer Conney Coot Diehl ExplorerAircraft GlassGoose Mariner Osprey ProgressiveAerodyne SeaSprite Seastar Seawind Spratt SunRay SunshineClipper Volmar X-Air
To Sort Revisions underway: try Version 1	To Sort or To Add or To Be Identified

Documents & Commentaries on Flying Boats

Editor's Notes & Commentaries

The Definition of a Flying Boat
There are all sorts of ways to get an aeroplane to travel in, on or Under the water. The focus of this website is Flying Boats: aircraft whose fuselage(s) double as a boat hull from which the primary flotation and buoyancy are derived. The pilot must sit inside the fuselage or directly on top of it - as in the case of USA's Bob Bailey Conney Amphibian. However the Grumman Duck caused some difficulty. Indeed it has a float but that float visually appears to very much be a part of the fuselage.

The objective of this definition is to eliminate Float Planes. Floats (or pontoons) can replace the landing-gear of almost any aeroplane including the Douglas DC -3 Airliner ! This definition is designed to eliminate:

Origins of this Website
My father, a WWII Navel fighter-pilot, used to point out the many Grumman Goose and Widgeons that worked the logging operations on Canada's West Coast. Then, one of my first flights as a young boy was in a Republic Seabee; we roared down Vancouver harbour and thought nothing of lying UNDER the bridge. I wasn't impressed......

So in the summer of 2001, as I grew bored of landing with wheels on our Cessna 172, a flying boat seemed like a natural alternative. I searched the WWW to see what a Seabee might cost, looked up the specs on Lake Amphibians, discovered that the Grummans might be a little out of my price range, and opened up a whole new world of homebuilt flying boats.

Inevitably I started coming across huge flying boats, from a very long time ago, with names that vaguely brought back stories from my Dad. The more I studied the wider the material spread and very quickly it was impossible to keep track of all the models of Flying Boat. As my interest piqued I started to save some of the photographs I was coming across and very slowly I started to understand the relationship of flying boats to history, war and aviation in general.

This website is the accumulation of all may saving, sorting and analysis. The end result is probably best used as an "identifying tool" but I'll be interested to hear your comments if it has been useful to you..
By the way, I decided I couldn't afford my own flying boat!

WIGs and Space-Shuttles
Watch out for WIGs - they look like Flying Boats!
Lots of aviation web-sites have a "Mystery Page" where they show photo's of unidentified aircraft. I've discovered that many of these "aeroplanes" really aren't aircraft at all..... they are:

"Wing in Ground-effect" ( WIGs ) vehicles are craft that can't fly more than a few meters (yards) off the water. The Russians lead the world in their development with designs such as the Orlyonok and the Caspian Sea Monster.

It seems that WIGs are illegal in Canada and the U.S.A. because legislators can't figure out how to classify a WIG! Anyhow, just to foul me up, a few WIGs like the Russian built Dingo are proper WIGs as well as being full-blown aeroplanes!

There is a totally awesome WIG website at: www.se-technology.com/wig

Still other mysterious flying boats are in fact spaceships! The Russian Mig 105 looks remarkably like a flying boat; as would, I suppose, the USA's Space Shuttle if we weren't used to seeing it on TV.

Links, Copyrights & Photographs
Just about all of the photographs shown here have been gathered from around the web. If some person or organization put their name on the photo then I certainly didn't remove that name, however I was amazed to find numerous occurrences of identical photographs with different names.....

This is a "hobby" website - I don't make any money with it (in fact I pay!); but if you really feel I am being evil and you want me to take YOUR photograph off this website just drop me an email.

External Links to other websites have been a HUGE problem. I guess many of the aviation related websites are hobbies, and as people "move along" in life their websites tend to die. As well, corporate websites get "rebuilt" which breaks the link to whatever page I wanted to focus upon.

I found a solution. Instead of linking to a useful website I take a back-up copy of the page and save it on this server. At the bottom of each of these "backed up" external pages I've put the original web-address so that you can easily go and look at the original (for as long as it exits).

There are few websites to which I am forced to provide an external link because they are absolutely spectacular in content and are critical to the art of accurately identifying Flying Boats.

External Links

General Flying Boat References - External Links

Canadian Seaplane Pilots Association (U.S.) Seaplane Pilots Association First Class Reference for American aeroplanes: First Class Linking page: Stalag 13 Aviation Links The Wig Page: www.se-technology.com/wig

Top of Site

Website donated by MSA Computer of Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada WebMaster: Aird@Flavelle.com Last Update: 081013; 070219