Our aviation patron Tailspin Tom took a wee trip to Lake Elsinore for to check out the soaring operations there. All that aside, he also got to scramble in and about the Martin Mars, which if you take a tour through his photo gallery is less a flying boat than a flying ship.
Used for firefighting operations, I gather. One hundred and forty-four spark plugs keep those four Wright Cyclone R3350-24WA radial engines churning out 2500 HP each, while burning a whopping 425 gallons per hour of fuel in cruise (780 while fighting fires). At a max gross weight of 162K pounds, she can carry 60,000 pounds of fire suppressant (6000 pounds of foam plus water), and cover 3 to 4 acres in a single drop at a couple hundred feet above ground level before coming back to skim the lake for more.
Lovely pictures – the man’s a wizard with the camera – take a look.
Great pix! Had a similar opportunity in the late 80′s when we were doing Joint ops with the Canadians up at CFB Comox on Vancouver Island. We went over to the Mars’ home base at Sprout Lake and asked if we could look around. When they heard we were NAS Alameda-based, the JRM’s old ancestral home, we got the “big” tour. “Massive” doesn’t even begin to tell the story on these babies. Thanks for putting them up!
VR,
Comjam
Very interesting. Thanks to both Lex and Tom for sharing.
Awesome to think that these monsters were designed and built essentially by hand- no computers to figure all the stuff out, just guys with pencils, big sheets of paper, and slide rules. And they were manufactured with equipment that would seem primitive third world gear by the few remaining outfits that actually make anything in the U.S. today.
Simply amazing in so many ways.
That is a sexy beast. Makes me sad P-8 won’t have floats.
John … first, a disclaimer. I’m not a pilot or an engineer, just an old civilian, but I remember judging at an orchid show in Miami in the early 1990s which was held in or near the site where the intercontinental flying boats of the 1930s and 40s were displayed, those that were still surviving. Talk about big! And luxurious, compared to today’s high tech tightly packed passenger planes. And all designed by engineers with paper and pencil and slipsticks, which almost all businessmen, even bankers, had back then for quick calculations of various sorts. [Abacuses are too large and clumsy for vest pockets.] My Dad, a banker, had one that he regularly carried.
I wonder if you can even buy one today.
Marianne
have a small collection of them on my desk at work — including my father’s in it’s leather case from his final WWII years in the V-12 program at MIT. Great for icebreaking with engineers. The young engineers look in wonder and the old ones get a little faraway glint in their eyes.
Marianne, you can still buy a slip stick. They’re all used these days, but obtainable. I started Engineering School in ’74 with an Arista, which my father bought when we were in Germany from ’58-61 and a Nestler which I bought in Naples Italy while I was in the Navy and used on the ship. The Navigator gave me a bit of grief, but it was mostly in fun.
Anyway, there are several websites you buy them on, and occasionally someone finds something in a warehouse somewhere still in the original packaging.
I took one to class in ’92 when I was finishing Engineering school, and only the Prof knew what it was. Heaven help us if we can’t get calculators anymore.
Funny about slip-sticks and what would happen if we couldn’t get calculators anymore (or Palm Pilots
) When I grew up every HS kid knew how to use one, (or at least those in college prep curriculum) now it’s an arcane lost art…
On further thought here for the bobbleheads–also sort of like the old multi-disk “IS-WAS” hand calculators the old pre-WWII S-Boat navs used have hanging around their necks.
Actually, slide rules are still made today, albeit for a niche market.
I still have my leather cased Pickett from high school floating around somewhere. I run across it from time, pull it out to do a 2×3 multiplication to make sure I can find the 6 on the rule, stick it away and vow “never again!”. It amazes me what engineers did with those. (I still have two TI SR-52 scientific calculators with the magnetic cards to go with them also. Antique technology tends to collect around me somehow.)
I’ve never been close to a Mars, but at the end of September, while driving from Palm Springs to the coast, I had the pleasure of seeing one working the mountains.
BIG airplane. I could tell what it was from 10 miles away (of course, there aren’t that many flying boats around- that kinda narrowed it down).
It’s so big and relatively slow, it looked almost like it was hovering.
Quartermaster … Thanks for your answer. I’ll search the Internet for slide rules as you suggest.
I have a special weakness for the quartermaster corps because they know important stuff like this — and my husband sometimes calls me the ‘quartermaster.’ Because that’s what wives are — quartermasters on the home front.
Marianne
A Quartermaster will know how to get you there, he certainly will have the charts.
A cousin of mine, who is a Culinary Institute of America schooled chef, told me that the stewards on the PA AM Clippers were CIA grads, as the food had to be cooked on board, then being in the pre cook it elsewhere, heat it up on board era.
In looking at the pictures I started wondering, given the height of the wing and the fact it is over water, how does the ground (water?) crew turn the props through by hand to verify the radials don’t have hydraulic lock from oil pooling in the lower cylinders. I thought pulling the prop through x number of blades was SOP on all radials.
BTW – did you get a look at the Flight Engineers Station? Shows why they needed them back in the day.
T6,
That practice went away after WWII. More modern radial engine starters Have a torque limiting feature causing them to slip in case of hydraulic lock. With the mechanical advantagage of reduction gearing, it is more likely to do damage by hand than by starter. The T-28 Natops Manual warns against hand propping for that reason.
Want to practice your sliderule skills? Head over to virtual sliderule.
http://tinyurl.com/36s8ah
Huh – impressive. Maybe a little less impressive since I went up to McMinnville for my Father-in-law’s birthday gift on Sunday – a trip through the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum, home of the Spruce Goose.
Just wish that you could still see the flight deck on the Goose without paying an extra $50.
Added a couple more shots of the JRM at the end of the album that I took from overhead this morning, and a couple screenshots from Microsoft Flight Simulator X.
As for pulling the prop through, if you pull it by the tip you do have enough leverage to pull through a hydraulic lock and bend the connecting rod. I know of an SNJ that crashed for that exact reason. He did a nice job of putting the bird down in a field with the windscreen covered with oil, and told the tale. Just a little tight in that one jug.
On the other hand, I’ve saved my butt twice by pulling the prop through. Once we’d swallowed a valve guide and once we’d spun the rear bearing. Both times I heard it pulling the prop, and both times you could almost read part numbers on the pieces in the sump.
Neither time was there enough resistance to cause the starter clutch to slip. So I still pull them through (gently), and no I don’t want help and please don’t talk so I can listen.
Great photos! I have a question in regards to microsoft flight simulator X and that airplane. I purchased it before for a previous version of FS but it did not have the true cockpit.
Does your FSX Mars have the real cockpit? (I doubt?)
Does it show the FE station 15 behind the cockpit?
Looks like you had a great time there, I am sure the staff was very nice.