Is anyone out there designing a scale PBY Catalina?

"Tom Osmundson" wrote in message
om...
That's it!!! That's the yellow monster of a sea-plane that was featured
in
the series. In a couple of "interior" (he, he) shots you could see the
tube
fuselage and the insulation as well as the bamboo furniture. Now if I
could
only remember the name of the series :-(
So, to come to your original post. Why could you not replicate or even
scale down this one instead of a Catalina?
Kumaros
It's all Greek to me
It's all Greek to me

I suppose one could duplicate it but it's kinda draggy with many
external braces and slow (although one could clean up the design). I'm
sure it works great, but lacks that classic look a catilina has. I
believe when I had some specs of it, the empty to gross ratio wasn't
the greatest. I think it was 5000 empty 8000 gross. It is metal, I'm
looking at composite for corrosion resistance. But you could make a
composite version of it (and get a better empty to gross ratio), like
I want to do to the PBY.

Some advantages of the PBY design is having the wing on a pylon. This
gets the same wing area (with same aspect ratio) in a shorter span. It
gets the engines up higher, out of the spray. The engines are close
enough together SE operation is relatively easy. You can stand on top
of the fuse to open a cowling and check the oil or whatever. The
retractable floats add cool factor but also adds weight. But outrigger
floats can be smaller than inboard sponsons to do the same job.

Tom: In the outer Pacific islands you can get auto gas, diesel and if
there
is a runway jet fuel. But NO avgas.
BTW I know a guy that flew a Grumman something or other Goose? out in
the
Marshalls for awhile. He now is in Calif selling a strange fast
outrigger
sailboat.
Stu Fields

Thank you for that post, I would have never thought of fuel
availability to that extent. That is definitely an advantage for using
200 hp deltahawk diesels(can use diesel or Jet A).

The CONCEPT of the Consolidated PBY was a very good one. Given the airfoils
and engines available in 1938, the execution wasn't too bad either. They
did the best they could with the materials they had to work with.

Creating a replica in composite materials would probably not save much if
any weight over metal but the impact strength of carbon-kevlar would be much
greater. I'd think that generally adopting the concept with changes
wherever the opportunity presented itself to improve the design would result
in a pretty cool aircraft.

Bill Daniels