Bombing Up A PBY-5A

Elroy13 · **Posted:** Wed Jun 27, 2007 9:59 pm

Cool pic Jack! Looks like its on beaching gear.

vg-photo · **Posted:** Wed Jun 27, 2007 10:47 pm

Yikes, that's quite a height to hoist those things! Don't drop it, boys.

Mark_Pilkington · **Posted:** Thu Jun 28, 2007 12:05 am

The aircraft is definately on beaching gear as the twin wheel of the starboard unit can be seen underneath the fuselage to the left of the personnel and the tail unit can clearly be seen in place near the legs of the personnel to the right.

However more interesting is that this is a PBY-5A amphibian rather than PBY-5 Flying Boat and therefore not normally in need of beaching gear unless the main u/c is u/s or being repaired.

The port Main wheel can be clearly seen retracted near the windscreen of the vehicle and the nose gear doors are clearly visable at the bottom of the hull at the left of the picture.

The use of the beaching gear may be to allow the "tail dragger" to have a lower wing position as compared to the "tricycle" configuration, to assist the adhoc? bomb loading? which seems to rely on the non-standard? use of a crane jib in this case?

regards

Mark Pilkington

Archer · **Joined:** Tue Nov 30, 2004 3:13 pm **Posts:** 449

Interesting photo!

I'm just thinking out loud here but another thought about the gear situation is that they might not have had the needed resources to get the gear down. If the airplane is floating and there's no-one around to run the engines I don't think you can get the gear down as there's no hydraulic power available. I'm sure that there's a handpump somewhere in the system but installing the beaching gear may simply have been less work than pumping the gear down by hand.

Dave Homewood · **Posted:** Thu Jun 28, 2007 7:36 am

Great photo Jack. Only today i was thinking about a very similar thing.

This afternoon I was interviewing (for my book) an aircrew member who served on RNZAF Short Singapore III flying boats in Fiji - which were what we used before getting the Catalina, doing the same work. They could not be beached at the time as there was no slipway and no beaching gear so all the maintenance was donw on the water. He told me the only bomb he ever dropped from the Singapore was when they were fitting bombs beneath the bottom wing (it's a four-engined biplane flying boat). The armourers didn't have the fancy boat and rig that the RAF had used with the Singapores before we got them. All they had was an eight foot wooden dinghy.

Anyway this one bomb was placed on the rack, done with three guys standing in the dinghy reaching up with the 250lb bomb. But they didn't realise it wasn't clipped in right and it fell off. Luckily it wasn't armed, and also luckily it hit the wooden seat of the boat, which snapped but broke the bomb's momentum otherwise it would have gone right through the floor. Now that's precarious stuff.

They appreantly lost lots of tools and things overboard too and were very grateful when RNZAF Lauthala bay was completed and opened so they could beach the boats.

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Bombing Up A PBY-5A

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