seawings wrote:Thanks, David.
Question: Is this the Catalina that crashed at Southampton all those years ago?
No. That was the Cyclone-powered
Super Cat VP-BPS in which I spent many a flying hour. But there was a tenuous link. When VP-BPS was first salvaged from Southampton Water she was taken to the old flying boat slipway aty Hamble adjacent to which was a land-based aircraft repair company. Some of the Hamble staff looked at VP-BPS and decided they could fix it and get it flying so they acquired it from the insurers and established themselves as
Super Catalina Restoration(s?). They moved the Catalina first to Lasham and then to Lee-on-the-Solent and although quite a lot of work was carried out, the wings got wind damaged and long periods of external storage did the airframe no favours. Then the group broke up and eventually VP-BPS was sold to a chap in Eire who planned to open a museum - that didn't happen and to cut a long story short, it was bulldozed into scrap in June this year.
But, along the way, Greenpeace's Catalina N423RS (the one now at North Weald) came onto the market and Super Catalina Restoration, or one of its prime movers, had the 'great' idea of buying it to fly on the airshow circuit and make some money whilst VP-BPS was restored. There was an added attraction that N423RS came with a large spares cache - in fact SCR were probably more interested in the spares. Anyway, it was flown from Duxford (where Plane Sailing's engineer had been keeping an eye on it) to Lee-on-the-Solent - and nothing happened! It too was sold and its current owner(s) have made one ferry flight with it from Lee' to North Weald.
So, for a while, these two Catalinas were side by side at Lee under the same ownership.