New flying boat pilots complained that the PBY was brutally heavy on the controls. The Consolidated team that limned its lines knew exactly what to include and what to leave off: a shapely, minimal hull rather than a standard flying boat barge two tightly cowled and wing-faired engines close to the centerline, ideal for single-engine handling, though they made directional control on the water a bit difficult a towering, fish-tail vertical fin to help with the steering both on the water and in the air clean, cantilever, strutless horizontal stabilizers and the colossal, fuel-fat wing that gave the PBY range and endurance far beyond anything else with propellers.Įven the waist-blister goiters that became so much a part of the flying boat’s look when they were added to the PBY-4 might have seemed excessive, but they were effective gunnery and observation posts.Īfter all, the famous “Attu Zero,” the largely undamaged example of the Japanese navy’s mythic fighter, was discovered by an airsick crewman who had leaned into his PBY’s blister and opened it to vomit just as the crashed Mitsubishi flashed below him. But never mind, the PBY, like all great objects of industrial design, exuded an air of absolute purposefulness.
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