I returned last night from the (13th Annual!) Boulder City, NV Albatross fly-in. What a great trip.
Drove out from here, because the plane I was supposed to fly, N26132, had a 100-hour inspection that went long. Would have taken me a lot less time to fly – about six hours driving each way versus around 2 1/2 hours flying, I calculated.
Obviously, I like planes, and for some reason I really love floatplanes. I have, so far, only a single hour of flight instruction in floatplanes, about ten years ago in Sausilito. I have no reasonable need for a floatplane (or arguably any plane at all, but that’s another matter!).
But of the floatplanes, the Albatross is certainly my favorite. Okay, well, maybe if I could get a Sikorsky S-38 (link, link) like the one Howard Hughes was shown teaching Katherine Hepburn to fly in Aviator – but they’re apparently nonexistant. In any case, I really like the style of the Albatross. Someday I really do hope to take lessons in one.
Dennis Kuhn is actually living one of my dreams – his company, American Warbirds, ressurects Albatross from the Tucson “boneyard” (which I have pictures of, somewhere!) and brings them back to flying condition. There were eight Albatross on the flight line at various times this weekend, ranging from bare metal to dolled-up, but all flying. Two from the competing surfwear companies, Billabong and Quicksilver – the Quicksliver plane of Bill Da Silva was the one I was lucky enough to ride in out to the picnic.
“With that camera you’ve got, you’ll want to ride up in the nose,” Bill told me. Up in the cockpit, under the dashboard, is a little door to the bow hold, which apparently used to house the radar dome (black, in the above picture), but now is capped by a plexiglass bubble, so (like T.S. Garp the nose-gunner) I got to lie on my belly in the very front of the plane as we flew in a 4-plane formation, over the airport and out over Lake Mead. Down through a slot canyon, only a few hundred feet up, which I heard the pilot say was flying stop-to-stop on the controls as he weaved through, then out over more lake and hills and down to “Big Sandy”, a long beach out at the east end of the lake. After a low fly-over of the beach where several of the pilots had camped out the previous night, we landed on the water and did a fast step-taxi back. Riding in the nose of the plane was truly like being able to fly.
Five or six of the planes ended up out there, along with a Widgeon, a Cessna Stationair (206?), a DeHaviland Beaver, a Super Cub, a pair of Republic Seabees, and two Lake Buckaneers. Note that there’s a difference between a “floatplane” – the Cub, Beaver, and Cessna – that sit up on pontoons, and “flying boats” like the Albatross, Widgeon, and Lake, and I guess the Seabee as well.
An excessive number of pictures are now on my gallery page. I’ve created a best of album as well, in case anyone doesn’t actually want to see all 203 of the pictures I took.