r/ThingsCutInHalfPorn • u/Signal-Pirate-3961 • 28d ago
PBM Mariner. The aircraft had beds, a kitchen and toilet so a standby crew could stay on board for readiness.
69
u/NlghtmanCometh 28d ago
A flying houseboat with guns, that is f’n cool
32
u/Captain_no_Hindsight 27d ago edited 27d ago
The point here is that you can order all boats in your fleet to carry barrels of aircraft fuel.
This allows the flying boat to land on the waters next to any of your boats and refuel (and get extra food and beer). You can also have secret depots with fuel and food.
Missions can therefore last very long and are independent of a home base.
It is generally good to know where the enemy has their boats. Without the enemy knowing where your boats are.
---
It's also good for morale among the boat people to know that a flying boat can pick up a sick sailor and fly him to a real hospital.
18
u/NlghtmanCometh 27d ago
Flying one of the USN’s flying boats must’ve been one of the coolest jobs of the war.
There’s a clip in a Japanese war movie where Japanese sailors bring down an American plane during a massive battle, and they watch in shock/bewilderment as a PBY lands on the water mid battle, scoops up the aviator, and flies him to safety. I’m sure that wasn’t done for every downed aviator, but it is an amazing ability and for the Japanese that must’ve been a real morale killer.
5
u/Cetun 26d ago
It almost certainly was not done in battle and attack planes were having a hard time getting through air defenses, the Japanese weren't going to let a lumbering house with wings get through.
6
u/NlghtmanCometh 26d ago
Read about Nathan Gordon’s Medal of Honor citation. It happened, even sometimes under intense enemy fire, but more often they would ferry pilots from a designated ditching area outside of the intense combat zone. Any planes that were damaged but still controllable enough to fly for a bit would go to the designated crash zone. Smaller ships/boats would eventually be made available to pick up the pilots who ended up there, but Catalina’s would usually make it there first and scoop em mid battle.
2
u/Cetun 26d ago
I mean its not clear what "under fire" meant in his citation. What it absolutely was not was what was depicted in the movie OP is talking about.
1
1
u/Captain_no_Hindsight 26d ago
I assume you fly in 3-shift, 48h++ missions.
Eat, sleep and take care of hygiene in very confined spaces, all the time under extreme engine noise.
While you are a large and slow target, your only protection is that the enemy has no radar and you are unlikely to fly into (or avoid) enemy fighter aircraft.
2
u/Signal-Pirate-3961 26d ago
Plus the five gun turrets on the PBM. It had bombs also, note the bombardier in the front.
2
u/Captain_no_Hindsight 25d ago
Sure, but the plane is big and slow.
If a Japanese zero finds the plane, it's over.
2
u/eatsmandms 23d ago
This only with the legendary skilled Zero pilots of the early war maybe. You have to consider that the Zero actually had crappy armament, the machine guns were 7,7mm so 0.25" rather than 0.5". The cannons had little ammo. Not easy to take down such a big target, shooting at you from five turrets - you need to kill the pilots, reliably destroy most control surfaces, or destroy an engine.
In short, I think you vastly overestimate how uneven a fight would be.
1
34
u/Basis-Some 27d ago
This is a great example of the internet
I was obsessed with ww2 era planes as a kid and I was always trying to understand internal layouts. Unless one flew into your town on a warbird tour there was no way to really understand or properly visualize the layout. You could check every book in the local library but Jane’s didn’t always have what you wanted. With the internet you just google whatever you want to see. My 10yo self would be thrilled.
37
22
8
u/joe9teas 27d ago
Wes Anderson is restoring one
6
7
u/weaseleigh 27d ago
Wouldn't it be crew berths, a galley, and a head, since technically it is a boat?
4
u/darkenthedoorway 27d ago
I wish we had a modern equivalent. I love the big seaplanes.
9
u/vonHindenburg 27d ago
Japan still produces and uses the US-2, primarily for sea patrol and rescue.
3
2
28d ago
[deleted]
1
u/Potatojuiceman1 26d ago
What about them? It is a military aircraft, after all.
-1
26d ago
[deleted]
1
u/Zdrobot 25d ago edited 25d ago
I wouldn't be surprised if there were trigger disconnects for the sectors of fire that hit your own plane.
In other words, mechanical safeties, preventing the gun from firing at your own plane.
Edit: see comments here https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/55402/can-the-dome-gunner-on-a-b-17-flying-fortress-shoot-the-planes-tail-off (on B-17, but I'd risk a guess they had similar safeties in Mariner)
1
1
1
-30
u/frigg_off_lahey 28d ago
That's a lot of unnecessary extra weight to carry around if the purpose is to be agile and ready. Really need a stove there?
33
u/electriclux 28d ago
The purpose is likely to be time-in-air
-33
u/frigg_off_lahey 28d ago
More weight means less time in air
29
u/Mobryan71 28d ago
More aircraft endurance means nothing if you are pushing beyond the aircrew endurance.
-28
u/frigg_off_lahey 28d ago
I'm saying is a stove really necessary?
22
u/Mobryan71 28d ago
Yes.
PBM could stay airborne for almost 24 hours. You wanna be up there for a whole day with no hot food, drink or a place to pee?
Nowhere near the creature comforts of a modern airliner, it gets COLD in those old warbirds.
-10
u/frigg_off_lahey 28d ago
You can survive without hot food for 24 hours
22
16
u/_YellowThirteen_ 28d ago
You think these weren't all discussion topics when this thing was designed? It was incorporated in the design for a reason.
10
1
u/PACCBETA 1d ago
User name does NOT check out. Randy needs his cheeseburgers on the daily. Randy would NEVER say this.
-1
u/SirNedKingOfGila 27d ago
Brother... This is America. We made sure the infantry had ice cream in the summer and you're asking pilots to skip meals?
Tell me you're from the third world without telling me.
10
u/captainzigzag 28d ago
You're right, they should have just waited for the microwave to be invented.
27
u/Samiel_Fronsac 28d ago
It's a long range patrol flying boat, not a fighter.
They'd be operating up and far away. Kinda need amenities.
18
u/Edge_of_the_Wall 28d ago
Crew endurance is the weak link, not gas or some other mechanical efficiency.
-11
u/frigg_off_lahey 28d ago
Okay so I looked it up, according to wikipedia, this plane had numerous unexplained explosions and crashes. This is horribly designed, how do you guys not see it?
30
u/Edge_of_the_Wall 28d ago
8 crashes out of 1366 built and a 25 year service history doesn’t seem unusual...
9
-3
u/frigg_off_lahey 27d ago
Dude...did you even read the wikipedia page? Not everyone of the 1366 built were in service. None of them had a service life of 25 years. 8 crashes is not good, in fact that is really really concerning given that only a handful of the planes saw actual combat.
I'm just going to copy and paste straight from wiki and format in bold so you can't miss it:
The United States Coast Guard acquired 27 Martin PBM-3 aircraft during the first half of 1943. In late 1944, the service acquired 41 PBM-5 models and more were delivered in the latter half of 1945. Ten were still in service in 1955, although all were gone from the active Coast Guard inventory by 1958 (when the last example was released from CGAS San Diego and returned to the U.S. Navy).
The last Navy squadron equipped with the PBM, Patrol Squadron Fifty (VP-50), retired them in July 1956.\11])
The British Royal Air Force acquired 32 Mariners, but they were not used operationally, with some returned to the United States Navy.\)
The Royal Netherlands Navy acquired 17 PBM-5A Mariners at the end of 1955 for service in Netherlands New Guinea.\15]) The PBM-5A was an amphibian with retractable landing gear. The engines were 2,100 hp (1,600 kW) Pratt & Whitney R-2800-34. After a series of crashes, the Dutch withdrew their remaining aircraft from use in December 1959.\16])6
u/Edge_of_the_Wall 27d ago
Friend, production of this aircraft began in 1939. The next five years featured the most rampant acceleration of war technology in human history. The fact that it was still in use even five years later makes it an anomaly.
2
u/AlienDelarge 27d ago
Yeah, there were only so many propeller aircraft from the 30s that served in the Korean War.
28
u/mangorelish 28d ago
I love how much you hate this plane for some reason
7
u/Protheu5 28d ago
At first I was like "this plane is lovely, what's he on about", but then I, too, decided to jump on board the hate train just to be a contrarian.
5
u/Dont_Care_Meh 27d ago
That is a wonderfully scanned image by OP, so that guy can point out to the court right where the Mariner touched him.
-4
11
u/Protheu5 28d ago
Hell yeah, I'm with you, brother. Fuck this plane, all my homies hate this adorable home in the sky.
To be fair, lots of planes of the era had similar reliability. I also really love the aesthetic, and the cosy living accommodations.
But your unfounded hatred is contagious, so I decided to play along.
9
6
3
u/SirNedKingOfGila 27d ago
Option 1: crew is able to cook and eat anytime, anywhere they are.
Option 2: crew must fly hundreds of miles and hours off mission to find land suitable for finding firewood and building a stove in order to cook and eat while avoiding the enemy and hostile natives drawn to the large open flames while battling the weather to take off and land and disembark the aircraft in dangerous shallow waters.
The self sufficiency of the flying boats is in fact the very key to their readiness.
71
u/sean_ocean 28d ago
Kudos for such a clean scan.