A Russian flying boat/sea plane/something or other

After I wrote the last post, my cousin, who's presently in Jersey in the UK, wrote and gave me a couple of links to videos of the Ekranoplan KM Caspian Sea Monster. I'd never heard of this seaplane before. It's not a pretty-looking thing, I must say; quite clunky, in fact. And it seems....large - a real monster. The comments on the first video provide some background, although, like so many comments on You Tube, it's hard to pick which commenters actually know something and which are just guessing their way through.

The video below is about 11 minutes - and the commentary is in Russian, so you have to guess what's being said about it. There's an intriguing moment about six minutes in when the thing lands on the sea then slides up onto the sand.

Flying Boats

I’ve just posted an article on trifter.com about flying boats. To be honest, it’s an article I’ve had on my files for a long time. Several years ago I did a lot of research on the subject and was keen to get the thing published, but could never quite find the right home for it. Anyway, this version of it now has a home and that’s satisfying enough for the moment.
My mother had a lot of interest in flying boats. If my memory serves me right, she flew to Australia in one, around 1939. One of her old scrapbooks has pictures from the local newspaper showing flying boats landing here in Dunedin harbour, something that’s rather hard to imagine now.
I always liked the idea of those great ships of the air and their luxurious, roomy cabins; the fact that you could sleep onboard if you wanted to, in proper beds, and that you’d be waited on by proper stewards, and fed at real tables.
Having been in a few planes over the last six months or more, most of which were unutterably cramped and unpleasant, it’s nice to dream of what it would be like in a classy flying boat.
I see that you can get a DVD of British RAF seaplanes and flying boats on one of the NZ sites. I’m almost tempted to check it out further!

An Old Captivity

Back in 1940, Nevil Shute, gradually becoming a much-acclaimed writer, published a book called, An Old Captivity. It was republished in 1967, and again in 1969. I have a copy of the 1969 edition, which I picked up at some fair with the intent to sell it off to Trade Me. (The book is again in print, by the way.)
Being short of something to read one day in the couple of months before Christmas I started into it. Full of detail about seaplanes and the flying of them (at least as far as things pertained to that period), the landing of them, the navigating of them, the full-on workload of maintaining them, and the not inconsiderable fact – which no doubt led to the demise of seaplanes commercially – that virtually everything has to be done on the water: refuelling, maintenance, cleaning up, removing bits of engines and so forth. Only occasionally is the thing pulled up on land, and then you get the feeling that this isn’t quite infra dig.
There’s not a mention of the War in spite of the time it was written. It’s strung together with three major characters who remain as bland throughout the book as they mostly are at the beginning; and told in an off-hand way with no suspense and nothing in the way of plot.

It’s a romance for a man who likes seaplanes. Consequently the romance side of it is barely worked on, and is summarily dismissed at the end.

More than three-quarters of the way through the book, after lots of flying time (described in detail – and certainly Shute knew his stuff), the main character, the pilot, has a long dream (he’s unconscious for three days). In it he sees himself in a period more than a thousand years previously, when the Vikings ruled and took slaves (from Scotland, in this case) and sailed the world, and discovered America. In the dream he falls in love with the only female slave of any consequence, and the two of them are about to escape when…he wakes up. The book ends some twenty pages later (!) having introduced a fantasy element into an otherwise very down-to-earth book (if you can describe a book about flying in such a way).

I only stuck with this book because I had read quite a bit of it, always waiting for something to happen, and thought Shute might finally have a surprise up his sleeve. Nope. It’s more like he wanted to describe what it was like to fly a seaplane, in detail, and tacked a story on to it. Somewhere along the line he realised he hadn’t really given his readers much to go on, so he bunged in a dream sequence. Having done that, he polished the thing off.

It runs to nearly 300 pages, and I’ve learnt heaps about flying seaplanes, if ever I should need this information. I’ve learnt nothing about what Shute thought about love and romance, and if I was a beginning writer, I’d know nothing about building a plot, producing suspense, or rounding out characters. Shute had written six novels before An Old Captivity, none of them as well known as later efforts. He was working on military projects for the War when the book was written, which may have distracted him a little.

There’s a very good summary of his life and work on Wikipedia, as there so often is these days!